
Class 
Book. 



- 



V. ' * ." 



GopightlJ?- 



CJQPMSIGKT DEPOSIT. 



THEY WHO UNDERSTAND 



THEY WHO 
UNDERSTAND 



BY 



LILIAN WHITING 



"Be constant, happy soul, be constant and of good 
courage! For thou wilt be protected, enriched, and en- 
lightened by the greatest good ; and if thou dost not turn 
away, but perseverest constantly, know that thou offerest to 
God the most acceptable sacrifice." — Miguel Molinos. 



INON-REFERTI 




cQlALVAP • Q3S 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BKOWN, AND COMPANY 

1919 



^ 






Copyright, 1919, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



All rights reserved 



Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 







X 


\- 


M 25 1919 


)CLA51 


5012 




*V 






Go 

THE BELOVED AND PRECIOUS MEMORY 

OF 

THE FLOWER OF AMERICAN YOUTH 

WHOSE HEROISM EXALTS AND CONSECRATES 

THE NEW FREEDOM 

THAT WILL INVEST A REMADE WORLD 

THUS TRANSFIGURED BY 

THEIR HOLY SACRIFICE 

— Lilian Whiting 

44 The gift of God w eternal life through 
Jesus Christ, our Lord " 



CONTENTS 

Chapteb Page 

I The Gates of New Life .... 1 

II The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 47 

III Evidential Communication and Proof . 74 

IV The Naturalness of the Next Phase of 

Life 109 

V How to Develop Spiritual Recognition . 132 

VI Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual 

Vision 153 

VII "Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" . . . 175 



" There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live 
as before ; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound ; 
What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good 

more; 
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect 
round." 

— Bbownino in "Abt Vogler." 



THEY WHO UNDERSTAND 



THE GATES OF NEW LIFE 

"... a Hand like this hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! 
See the Christ stand!" — Browning in "Saul." 

A GREAT spiritual awakening is over the 
world. " Where Christ brings His cross 
He brings His presence," and never was 
the intuitive turning of all humanity to God, in 
the face of sorrow, more evident than at the 
present time. We read a new meaning into the 
wonderful words, "God is our refuge and our 
strength ; a very present help in time of trouble." 
The words are a foundation of actual life; not 
merely nor even mostly consolation, in the 
ordinary sense, but a basis of the deepest reality 
on which to stand. We endure — as seeing the 
invisible. It is the world we do not see in which 
we live ; it is the forces of the unseen which sus- 

1 



They Who Understand 



tain all purpose. Nor is it only in hours of sad- 
ness and bereavement that we would turn to God ; 
our own poet of the spiritual life, the gentle and 
beloved Longfellow, has given true expression to 
an universal feeling in the lines : 

"Ah, when the infinite burden of life descendeth 
upon us, 

Crushes to earth our hope, and, under the earth, 
in the graveyard, 

Then it is good to pray unto God ! for His sorrow- 
ing children 

Turns He ne'er from His door, but He heals and 
helps and consoles them. 

Yet it is better to pray when all things are pros- 
perous with us, 

Pray in fortunate days, for life's most beautiful 
Fortune 

Kneels before the Eternal's throne; and with 
hands interfolded, 

Praises thankful and moved the only Giver of 
blessings." 

A very present help in time of trouble, a help 
equally needed in time of joy, — in every supreme 



The Gates of New Life 



experience of life the soul turns intuitively and 
instinctively to the divine aid. The nature of 
this aid is constantly being more clearly revealed 
to us. It is also true that in the deepening 
spirituality of life man is more and more depend- 
ing on this aid. Our religious faith is becoming 
to us the most absolutely practical reliance. This 
deeper assurance springs largely from our increasing 
comprehension of the nature of life ; of the origin, 
the development, the conditions of progress, and 
the final destiny of the spiritual man which is 
the individual himself. To speak of the destiny 
of the soul as if it were something apart from the 
man, is misleading. Shall we not realize the 
simple and fundamental truth that we are, here 
and now, spiritual beings, dwelling in a spiritual 
world ; that it is the spiritual and not the physical 
world to which we belong; that we are tem- 
porarily clothed with a physical body as the in- 
strument in correspondence with the physical 
environment in which we sojourn for a season? 
Yet, all the while, even during this sojourn, we 
are still the inhabitants of the spiritual world; 
a world of "discrete degrees", as Swedenborg 



They Who Understand 



points out, in which the ethereal is the next 
succeeding environment to the physical; after 
which we pass on to still finer and finer degrees 
of environment, even from glory to glory, as the 
apostle phrases it. Now, as we are here and in 
the immediate present an inhabitant of both the 
physical and ethereal realms; tethered to the 
former by the physical mechanism; related to 
the latter by virtue of the ethereal body in which 
we find ourselves when we withdraw from the 
physical body (as one would withdraw his hand 
from a glove), does it not seem luminously clear 
that those of our beloved who have thus with- 
drawn by the process we name death are still 
in close relations to us ? Never was there a time 
in human history when the question was so vital 
as now, when thousands of homes are desolated 
by the vanishing of son, brother, or husband in 
the tragic and terrible conflict which has been 
raging. Unless life and all its interests and 
purposes extend beyond the merely visible 
limits, what philosophy or consolation could 
we find? 
During the Boer War Archdeacon Wilberforce 



The Gates of Neio Life 



said, in a private letter to a friend : " What do you 
think is the state of these great numbers of young 
Englishmen suddenly hurled out of life? Where 
are they? What are their first experiences ? " 
When the present Archbishop of Canterbury 
visited the United States in 1906, preaching elo- 
quently in many churches, he asked, in one dis- 
course, " The life beyond, — what is it ? What 
is its relation to the life about us?" The Arch- 
bishop instanced this question as the first one 
that would rush to our lips if, for a single hour, 
we had full access to Him "who is the Source 
and Object of our faith." 

If that question were vital in 1906, what is it in 
this year of 1919, when it voices the thought that 
is in every heart? We are living in great 
moments. Supreme sacrifice is lifting humanity 
to the heights hitherto undreamed. But through 
what suffering, what sorrow of bereavement do 
we strive to behold a still nobler future! Are 
those homes made desolate; those hearts which 
cry, — 

" But oh for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still 1" 



They Who Understand 



are they to be left groping in chaotic darkness, 
hoping, trusting, yet feeling that they do not 
really know in what state are these gallant young 
lives that have passed, or in what relation to life 
still here? 

Can we know ? It is not too much to say that 
it is absolutely assured that we may penetrate 
to a considerable extent beyond the horizon line 
that divides the unseen and the seen. For this 
horizon line is not a fixed wall ; it is not a definite 
and immovable boundary ; it is a line that recedes 
as constantly before the increasing development 
of spiritual perceptions as does the horizon line 
of distance before the eye of the traveler. Scien- 
tific knowledge of the nature of the universe and 
the increasing power to lay hold of spiritual truth 
unite to reveal to man something of the conditions 
in which those who withdraw from the physical 
world find themselves. So we may question : 
After all, just what has happened? One who 
was on earth yesterday, so tenderly beloved and 
cherished, is to-day in the next succeeding environ- 
ment of our eternal and immortal life. What 
does this transition signify to him and to us? 



The Gates of New Life 



First of all, we may be confidently assured it does 
not signify loss and loneliness and unbroken 
sorrow. To a marvelous degree death gives, 
rather than takes away. Spirit to spirit ap- 
proaches more closely than when both were 
limited by the physical mechanism. One is now 
liberated from this, and therefore more fully in 
command of his powers. When one comes to 
think of it, the physical body is a separation to 
a degree. How universal is the recognition of 
love far deeper than can be expressed in human 
language. How universal is the recognition of 
both feeling and thought that can never be fully 
translated into ordinary expression. 

" We are spirits, clad in veils ; 
Man by man was never seen ; 
All our deep communion fails 
To remove the shadowy screen." 

In this stanza and others in the same poem, 
Christopher Pearse Cranch, one of the spirits 
"finely touched but to fine issues", — one of that 
Cambridge group which included Lowell, Story, 
and that spirit of loveliness and love whom we 



They Who Understand 



knew on earth as Charles Eliot Norton, — in these 
lines Mr. Cranch felicitously embodied a pro- 
found truth. In this part of life we are veiled 
to each other. We do not, at best, penetrate 
very far beyond the "shadowy screen. " The 
tragedy of love is its possible misinterpretations. 
"How often,'' said Mr. Longfellow, "we call a 
man cold when he is only sad." As a matter of 
fact there may be a beautiful interlude in this 
period when one of the two closely conjoined by 
ties of affection is in the ethereal and one still in 
the physical world. There are thus three phases 
of companionship which are fairly clear to us: 
One when both are here in this part of life; the 
second when one is in the ethereal and the other 
here; while the third, when both are again to- 
gether in the same environment in the next succes- 
sive stage of life, is becoming recognizable to us. 
We did not regard it as a cause for sorrow when, 
in the easy and happy days that preceded that 
fatal August of 1914, one held most dear left 
us for a time for a journey to Europe or to the 
Far East. The visible presence had temporarily 
vanished, but what added richness of life was 



The Gates of New Life 



shared! The interest and charm of the new 
experiences of the traveler brought their added 
interest and charm to the life of the one who 
remained at home. The analogy is unerring. 
The interlude of companionship between one in 
the unseen and one here may be, — indeed, it 
should be, — a period of peculiar uplifting and 
holy joy. One reason (perhaps the only reason) 
why it is not, is that the one left on earth is so 
plunged into grief, so submerged in sorrow, that 
the continual messages of thought and love 
cannot pass through the impenetrable gloom. 
Washington Irving said that sorrow for the dead 
was the only sorrow that we cherished; all 
other wounds we sought to heal, but this sorrow 
we regarded as one that we should not en- 
deavor to lessen. The words reveal to how 
signal a degree we have advanced between the 
time of Mr. Irving and our own. Even when 
grief is unassuaged, the one in sorrow now makes 
brave efforts to rise above it and be cheerful for 
the sake of others. During the past quarter 
of a century the change of attitude toward 
death has been very apparent. 



10 They Who Understand 

Perhaps no one who was present at the last 
rites for Phillips Brooks (January 26, 1893) can 
ever fail to remember that the entire spirit of the 
service was that of a sacred festival. There was 
such spontaneous recognition of the immortal 
qualities of the man that there was no room for 
mourning. It was felt by all that there was little 
of his life that could die. Those who have been 
privileged to hold close companionship with the 
noble and the lofty cannot regard their transition 
from this phase of life as any finality of separation. 
In all ages and in all nations the great of soul 
have transcended death. The Reverend Doctor 
Ernest Stires, rector of St. Thomas's in New 
York, thus speaks in a recent discourse of this 
transition : 

" How very stupid we are about death ! The 
day that brings God's summons is our real 
Commencement Day. All our earthly life is an 
education, a preparation, for a larger career. 
The best that we have done here is valuable not 
merely for its contribution to earthly life, but 
for the training for the higher service." 

Doctor Stires added: 



The Gates of New Life 11 

" Hold fast to your comforting idea of God ; 
keep your inspiring vision of life's meaning ; have 
beautiful dreams of the joy of dear ones in the 
Life Eternal; and remember that all our ideas, 
our visions, our dreams are true only as they may 
be beautiful and strengthening; and that at 
the point of their fairest beauty they are yet short 
of the glorious facts, for the realities of God 
transcend man's highest hopes. " 

This interlude is one that has come into 
thousands of homes from which the brave and 
gallant youth of our country have gone forth 
to return no more. "This will be known as the 
age 'when knighthood was in flower V' Doctor 
Stires has also said, — the age in which the 
spirit of youth responded to the voice and the 
vision. "Life runs large" in the inspiration of a 
Cause when to the young man there comes that 
"voice without reply", and he hears, — 

" 'Tis man's perdition to be safe 

When for the truth he ought to die. " 

It is a spiritual awakening to this young knight- 
hood. 



12 They Who Understand 

"I think I should go mad if I did not cherish 
faith in the justice of things, and a confident 
belief that death cannot end great friendships/* 
wrote Robert Sterling, who won the Newdigate 
prize at Oxford for his poem, "The Burial of 
Socrates ", and who was killed at the front on St. 
George's Day of 1915. This boy-poet, whose 
sojourn on earth had been less than twenty-two 
years, and Alan Seeger, who knew that he had 
"a rendezvous with death", and who went for- 
ward with joyful courage, are two, typical of 
multitudes. These young men who enter on 
the next phase of life are aglow with noblest 
enthusiasms; they are spiritually alive; they 
are in readiness to lay hold on progress as is the 
youth who enters the university filled with 
enthusiasm for learning rather than with indiffer- 
ence to his privileges. "He in whom the divine 
light has not awakened is virtually asleep in the 
spirit, and therefore cannot act upon spiritual 
things any more than a man asleep can act upon 
material things," says an Oriental writer. The 
conditions in which these young men pass into 
the unseen render them spiritually awake and 



The Gates of Neio Life 13 

alert. They compassed more than the ordinary 
spiritual progress of a lifetime within the brief 
period of their entrance into a conflict which 
aroused all holy enthusiasm. This fact, alone, is 
one of infinite significance. What new meaning 
has their transition? One aspect of this signifi- 
cance is that study and research into spiritual 
truth has quite established the actual fact that 
the higher spirituality achieved during the 
physical tenure of life renders the spiritual man 
far more free and buoyant on his entrance into 
the ethereal realm. The analogy may be found 
in that of one entering on this life with unimpeded 
vision rather than blindness. 

After all, just what has happened? One who, 
so tenderly beloved and cherished, was here 
yesterday, sharer of our familiar conditions, is 
to-day in the conditions just succeeding our 
own; he has withdrawn from these. Yesterday 
he was in the physical realm. To-day he is in 
the ethereal realm. What does this transition 
signify to us, or to him? 

The tragedy of the War has brought home to 
us these questions in a way that becomes a vital 



14 They Who Understand 

issue. Where are they, — the gallant young 
soldiers who offered their earthly lives with 
abounding heroism for the great cause of human 
freedom? In The Nation, under date of July 
13, 1918, occurs this paragraph : 

" Of the spiritual questions raised anew by the 
Great War, none is attracting more attention 
than that of the immortality of the soul. The 
enormous loss of life on the battlefield, the un- 
fulfilled character of the lives thus abruptly 
ended, the hunger of those left behind for reunion 
with 'the loved and lost' combine to quicken 
and deepen the perennial interest in the problem 
of survival after death. Of the various phases 
of this interest in immortality, none is more 
striking than the renewal of discussion of 
spiritualism, psychical research, and kindred 
matters." 

The question of the immortality of the soul! 
To those whose faith in immortality is as absolute 
as their existence, the idea of its being a "ques- 
tion", a debatable problem, is almost untenable. 
Yet that to a large proportion of humanity it 
still is such must be recognized. The "will to 



The Gates of New Life 15 

believe" does not alone create faith. That 
seems to be a conviction with or without which 
one is born. One has faith as he has his very 
existence ; or, — he has not. Nor is it a question 
of ethics or morals. It is, apparently, a question 
of the degree of one's spiritual development, of 
the opening of the spiritual nature. Multitudes 
of people, of flawless integrity and beneficent 
life, do not yet find themselves with this absolute 
and unquestioning conviction. And as Tennyson 
so justly says, — 

" There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds.' , 

There is no virtue in professing a belief, a con- 
viction, that one does not feel. Quite the con- 
trary. Let us be honest with ourselves. Let us 
search, — not for argument to sustain any favorite 
or preconceived theory, but for truth alone. Yet 
as Frederic W. H. Myers has said, there is, doubt- 
less, in each of us "an abiding psychical entity 
far more extensive than one knows ; an individu- 
ality which can never express itself completely 
through any corporeal manifestation." Few are 



16 They Who Understand 

the persons who are mentally satisfied to deny the 
possibility of immortality, even though they 
declare that they perceive no evidence for it. 
Very few persons find themselves resting con- 
tentedly with a negative conviction. They 
"hope" it is true, even while, in the same breath, 
they may declare that they see no reason to 
justify this hope. In a way there seem to be 
three classes of attitude; that which believes 
unquestioningly from intuitive recognition sup- 
ported by religious faith; that which has come 
to be convinced by evidence, — the evidence of 
survival by means of communications and 
messages from beyond; and that which is quite 
ready to be convinced, if the evidence seems to 
them sufficiently undeniable. 

To no one of these attitudes can any objection 
be made. For they are all honest and sincere. 

For more or less varying periods the matter is 
not, to many, the most vital issue of life. 
All at once through a great bereavement it 
becomes such. The heroic young son, brother, 
or husband has suddenly met death on the battle- 
field. Or, in some other manner, some one 



The Gates of New Life 17 

dearly beloved has vanished into the unseen. 
Then love is on the alert to penetrate the mystery. 
First of all let us realize that nothing evil has 
happened. This change whose process we call 
death is simply that the spiritual man, the real 
being, one's self, so to speak, withdraws from the 
outer physical tenement, just as the hand is 
withdrawn from a glove. The spiritual being 
which is the man himself is temporarily clothed 
with a physical body for his use while he is in the 
physical world. It is this which relates him to 
the physical world; which enables him to come 
into touch with it. It is the instrument, the 
mechanism, that provides for the spiritual being 
his means of acting on and with physical forces, 
just as the piano, the violin, the pen, the type- 
writer, enable the musician to audibly embody his 
music, the writer to make visible expression of 
his thought. The physical body is that wonderful 
and perfectly adapted mechanism, or instrument, 
by which alone the spiritual being can come into 
relations with, and by means of which he may 
effectively accomplish achievements in the physi- 
cal world. It is no more the man himself than 



18 They Who Understand 

the glove is the hand; or than the piano is the 
musician, or the pen the writer. Shall we not 
clearly recognize this truth, first of all? The 
man has withdrawn from his physical sheath. 
At best, it was only designed for temporary use. 
Somewhere within a hundred years, as a usual 
thing, we all withdraw from these sheaths. 
And then? 

Then we enter on the life more abundant. 
But just what does that inspiring phrase signify ? 
Is it merely a vague term whose meaning cannot 
be clearly grasped ? Not so. The physical body, 
while its use is to permit the man to relate his 
energies to a range of objective achievements, 
yet limits his expression. He has far greater 
capabilities than can thus be expressed, as a great 
musician cannot adequately express his music 
by a piano limited to four octaves. The spiritual 
man then, the real individual, has far more to 
express than the limited mechanism of the physi- 
cal body allows him to transmit through its 
means ; therefore, when he has withdrawn from 
it he experiences a sense of freedom, of an exhilara- 
tion of energy, of a power undreamed of before. 



The Gates of New Life 19 

The first sensation, as a rule, is that of a fairly 
rapturous and ecstatic delight. We know this 
by the vast accumulation of testimony that 
cannot be either doubted or denied. From the 
assurance of Jesus, the Christ, to the present 
time, its volume has been increasing. The 
ethereal body (which is now free from the limi- 
tations of the outer physical body) is in cor- 
respondence with the ethereal environment, 
the realm just succeeding that in which we 
now live. 

What is the nature of this environment? Is 
it something so strange, so incomprehensible to 
our present conceptions, that we can form no idea 
at all of it? Not so. It is perfectly natural. 
It is in a perfect continuity of relation to our 
present environment. It has been called a replica 
of the physical world. But, instead, the physical 
world is a lesser and feebler replica of the ethe- 
real. Because the latter is the more real. The 
ethereal is the realm of causes. The physical 
is the realm of effects. As life progresses it 
grows more real and more significant, as the life 
of the man or woman is more real and significant 



20 They Who Understand 

than the life of the infant. But, holding the 
analogy still further, as the infant merges into 
childhood, youth, maturity, age, without any 
startling change from day to day, progressing 
by a system of perfect and unbroken continuity, 
so, in this absolutely unbroken continuity, does 
the life in the physical world merge into that 
of the ethereal world. There is no definite line 
of demarcation. It is the unbroken continuity of 
evolutionary progression. The man who shared 
our life yesterday in these familiar surroundings 
shares our life to-day in his new environment. 
He, in his essential self, is unchanged. But he 
has entered on a larger round of possibilities and 
of opportunities for his expanding powers. His 
first sensation is that of an incommunicable 
joy. This ecstatic sense of freedom ; this intense 
interest of a new and boundless range of life, — 
not separated from the order of life he has just 
left, but including that and beckoning on to that 
which is infinitely greater, — how beautiful and 
how joyous it is ! With one possible exception ? 
Alas, it is almost always an exception, and that 
is the grief of those dear to him who do not com- 



The Gates of New Life 21 

prehend the blessedness and the beauty of the 
transition. 

Now when we come to realize its true nature, 
should not this interlude be a joyful one on both 
sides? May we not think of our dear human 
relations as falling into three distinctive phases; 
the one when both are in the physical world; 
the second when one is in the physical, one in the 
ethereal ; the third when both are in the ethereal ? 
The first one of these phases has had its sweet- 
ness and its joy for us ; but the second, too, has 
its joy and its sweetness. "Lift up your hearts.'' 
Nothing evil has happened. The companionship 
of spirit to spirit is unbroken. Then, the third 
phase, that of the reunion of both in the ethereal 
world, awaits. It is an event absolutely assured. 
There is no doubt about it. It is, at most, only 
a question of time. Now, why not accept the 
happiness, yes, even the happiness of this inter- 
lude? It offers its own beauty and interest. It 
offers great opportunities for both intellectual 
and spiritual experience and expansion. It has 
its own peculiar privileges and special joys that 
have not presented themselves before and will 



22 They Who Understand 

not present themselves in just this manner again. 
Shall we not make it a rich and beautiful period 
rather than one of loss and gloom and sorrow? 
Because in that way we may contribute so much 
to the happiness of those who are so dear and who 
have passed into the unseen. 

It is not strange that this period has been made 
one of mourning and sadness to those who have 
not come to comprehend more truly the real nature 
of that change we call death. It has been veiled 
in mystery because we have not fully understood 
the real teaching of Jesus. To some extent both 
He and the apostles taught in parables and in 
symbolic language, and it is only in the larger 
illumination of modern interpretation that we 
have quite realized the simple and sincere mean- 
ing of the gospels. "With what body do they 
come?" asks Saint Paul in his epistle to the 
Corinthians. The context compares the resurrec- 
tion of the ethereal body with the physical 
body, — the withdrawal of the ethereal from the 
physical — with the sowing of grain which is 
quickened and springs up from the ground. 
" So, also," says Saint Paul, " is the resurrection 



The Gates of New Life 23 

of the dead." Our error in the past has been 
that we failed to realize that his "resurrection" 
is but another name for the very process that we 
call death. It is the rising of the spiritual man 
from the physical encasement which he discards, 
as one discards outworn garments. He who 
dies thus rises in newness of life. That is what 
dying means. Now to rise in newness of life is 
very beautiful. It is also very joyful. And the 
beauty and the joy are for us whose love follows 
the arisen, so tenderly and unfailingly, as well 
as for them. Indeed, their possibilities of joy 
are very greatly diminished if not lost by our 
grief and sorrow. Now it is the one greatest com- 
fort to feel that we may still do something for 
those dearer than our owm life; and we can do 
this; we can lift up our hearts and recognize 
the nature of the change that has come to them 
and share with them the joy of it. Archdeacon 
Wilberforce of Westminster in an Easter sermon 
said : " Resurrection means continuity of in- 
dividuality, utter abolition of death as a con- 
crete reality, the exposure of death as a sham and 
a delusion." These are strong words from one 



24 They Who Understand 

of the most devout of churchmen; and in addi- 
tion the Archdeacon suggests : 

"It is mere self-deception, of course, to pretend 
that death is a delusion on the physical plane ; it 
is not ; . . . but, from within, the man, — the 
real man, rises into the new conditions. . . . The 
moment of death is the moment of resurrection, 
the essential identity the same. And remember, 
death is the re-uniter of loving presences." 

The young hero who, in all his holy enthusiasm, 
flung himself into devotion to the sublime ideal 
for which our soldiers were fighting, and who, 
yesterday at the front, was separated from those 
who held him nearest, but who, to-day, has 
passed into the unseen realm, is no longer 
separated. Death gives us our beloved. It is 
the contingencies of this part of life that take 
them from us. 

Following the wonderful illumination of the 
teachings of Saint Paul we read : " It is sown a 
natural body ; it is raised a spiritual body. There 
is a natural body and there is a spiritual body." 
The two are coincident ; the spiritual body (which 
is the real, the substantial body) is clothed by the 



'The Gates of Neio Life 25 

natural for a limited period of time. One need 
not look beyond the familiar passages of the 
gospels to find authority and confirmation for the 
conviction of the present reality of the spiritual 
body (the "substantial" body, as Saint Paul 
well calls it), for it persists; while its outer 
physical case, being unsubstantial, decays and 
disappears on the withdrawal of the substantial 
one. To clearly recognize this initial fact is to 
gain the conditions to grasp the larger truth in 
direct sequence, — that, with the existence of 
the friend in his spiritual body (of which the 
physical form we knew was a replica), compan- 
ionship and communion, even definite commu- 
nication, are natural and even inevitable. 

If I seem to dwell unduly upon this matter of 
the spiritual body it is because psychical research 
has so largely used the term "discarnate" in 
referring to those who have withdrawn from the 
life on earth. The term "discarnate spirit " 
may be scientific (by custom) but it is not 
spiritual truth. There is no such thing in the 
infinite universe as a "discarnate" spirit. Every 
spirit is clothed in a body. As life goes on and 



26 They Who Understand 

on, these bodies become finer and more subtle. 
But for the moment we are not considering the 
momentous possibilities of future eternities, but 
rather the immediate present after the with- 
drawal. For the sake of clearness may I just say 
that in a vast completeness of contemplation, 
the body that first succeeds the physical is 
termed the ethereal; and that successively be- 
tween the conditions of the ethereal and the 
spiritual bodies there are differences of degree; 
but not to make our present survey encumbered 
with detail, one may simply refer to this the real 
body as the spiritual, which it is, indeed, in a 
potential degree. 

The assumption that the natural grief and sor- 
row for the death of those tenderly cherished is a 
matter to be approached without comprehension 
and sympathy is not tenable. Into all the sweet 
relations of our human life this sorrow falls. It 
is our universal experience. But just because 
it is universal, a grief in common to us all, we 
may approach it with mutual inquiry. 

A little understanding of the conditions in which 
we now live throws great light upon the problem 



The Gates of Neiv Life 27 

of the interrelations of life in the physical and 
the ethereal realms. We are, here and now, 
spiritual beings inhabiting a spiritual world. We 
are only partially physical beings inhabiting a 
physical world. Our sojourn in this physical 
realm is limited. Our physical body is only a 
temporary convenience. 

When Sir Oliver Lodge made clear to science 
the existence of the ether of space he thus pro- 
vided a very definite condition for the environ- 
ment of those who have passed through death. 
Sir Oliver's work was purely scientific; but one 
could hardly grasp the scientific truth without 
discerning its spiritual prototype. The great 
scientist finds that the ether is the most solid, 
the most substantial thing in the known uni- 
verse, — " Perhaps the only substantial thing in 
the material universe," he says. Sir Oliver adds 
that, in comparison with the ether, "the densest 
matter, such as lead, or gold, is a filmy, gossamer 
structure; like a comet's tail, or a milky way, 
or like a salt in a very dilute solution." Now 
this substantial, etheric world is absolutely inter- 
penetrated with our physical world. It forms 



28 They Who Understand 

conditions coexistent. With this ethereal en- 
vironment the ethereal (or spiritual) body is in 
the same correspondence that the physical body 
is with the physical environment. So this truth 
provides a definite answer to our first question : 
Where are those who were here yesterday and 
have vanished to-day ? Where are they ? Under 
what conditions are they living? 

Think of the difference it is to us to simply 
believe in immortality, but with no definite idea 
as to what form immortality assumes; to try 
to conceive a "discarnate" spirit; an "essence"; 
a "persistence of consciousness"; or to realize 
that the man who has withdrawn from his 
physical body is as definitely clothed in his ethereal 
body and is living as definitely (and as naturally) 
in the ethereal environment as we are in the 
physical environment. What a tremendous 
difference that makes to us at once. There is 
something to take hold of, to understand. We 
not only believe ; we absolutely realize something 
of the nature of the life in which he is now dwell- 
ing. Sir Oliver Lodge did not himself, in his 
wonderful little book entitled "The Ether Of 



The Gates of Neiv Life 29 

Space", present its spiritual prototype. It is the 
purely scientific work of a great scientist. That 
is what makes it so tenable as a basis from which 
to still farther extend its significance. For if 
this ethereal world is so substantial one recog- 
nizes that it provides and explains the environ- 
ment for the next succeeding phase of life. 

That communication exists between those in 
the seen and those in the unseen worlds is a truth 
as definitely and unmistakably proven as is the 
reality of messages by the Marconi system. This 
communication has always existed. The Bible 
is full of instances and illustrations. In modern 
times the authentic experiences of Swedenborg 
alone would tend to convince the reader. And the 
vast accumulation of evidence is so great that 
no argument from details need be entered upon 
here. Any reader who is not convinced of this 
has only to make his own researches and to form 
his own convictions. The aim in these pages is, 
while assuming the truth of communication, to 
endeavor to trace out the conditions that render 
it possible and that also establish its probability, 
even its certainty. These conditions are two- 



30 They Who Understand 

fold, — those of the very nature of man himself 
and of the interpenetration of the two successive 
environments, the physical and the ethereal. 
We hold perfectly clear and definite relations 
with our friends in the unseen, just as we do with 
those in the visible world. The only difference 
is that the relations with the unseen are more 
intimate, more unfailing, more truly a companion- 
ship of spirit. The physical body that died was 
a mechanism that transmitted this companion- 
ship of spirit but transmitted it imperfectly. 
The friend who is in the ethereal, with that more 
abounding life, is in a more direct relation to 
us here than are our fellow beings on earth. 

A vast body of communications, ranging practi- 
cally over all time, have affirmed the existence of 
a realm not unlike our own ; of continents, seas, 
mountains, lakes, forests, rivers; of cities and 
of country; of churches, temples, schools; of 
music, of lectures, of art, of the worship of God. 
But how, we have questioned, can this be? 
Now, if the ether of space has the solidity and 
the reality that has been scientifically demon- 
strated by Sir Oliver Lodge, we understand how 



The Gates of New Life 31 

it can be. And if the ethereal world is thus inter- 
penetrated with our physical world (as vibrations 
prove), we realize how this world is with us in 
our very midst. Further, and this, too, is a 
scientific fact, the ether is so elastic that it 
transmits the slightest impression made upon it, 
and thus thought, which is the most potent force 
in the universe, is instantly transmitted from 
spirit to spirit; from one who is still physically 
embodied to one in the ethereal embodiment. 
Thought is a power of such invincible potency 
that the kingdoms of the earth are helpless 
before it. Love is a force of such divine potency 
that it takes the wings of the morning and darts, 
straight as a beam of light, to him to whom it is 
sent. Thought and love, they are the irresistible 
powers of life. 

The rationale of the change we call death reveals 
it as no evil, no calamity, but a step onward in 
our great evolutionary progress. In our more 
spiritualized religious faith we shall come to 
recognize death as a sacred festival rather than 
as an occasion for gloom or sadness. Jesus came 
to bring life and immortality to light ; to demon- 



32 They Who Understand 

strate to us that spiritual life is eternal in its 
nature. We simply discard successive environ- 
ments as we go on from glory to glory. Now 
and here, man, as a spiritual being, has the 
spiritual organs of sight, hearing, and, indeed, 
entire perception of presences that his physical 
eye cannot see. And why? It is very simple. 
It is a mere technical matter. 

In the infinite octaves of vibration, the physical 
organs of the eye and ear only register a small 
proportion. Ultra-violet light, for instance 
(which, in technical language, only begins with 
the fifty-first octave, and which is demonstrated 
in the laboratory), is in a vibration beyond that 
which the eye can register. We recognize here 
but the smallest proportion of the etheric vibra- 
tions. Now the ethereal body is in this state 
of high vibration and is thus beyond the point 
which the eye registers. The friend in the unseen 
stands by our side and we do not see him. In the 
law of vibration lies the scientific explanation, — 
an explanation likewise applicable as to why 
we do not hear his voice when he speaks to us. 
But there are other ways of hearing than by the 



The Gates of New Life 33 

ear. Telepathy is the language of the spirit. 
Thought to thought responds unerringly. And, 
as is well known, there are the phenomena of 
clairvoyance and clairaudience. When man 
more fully develops the organs of his spiritual 
body, these will cease to be phenomena. They 
will be the natural faculties of his daily experience. 
"Within, beyond, the world of ether," said 
Frederic W. H. Myers, "must lie the world of 
spiritual life. That the world of spiritual life 
does not depend upon the existence of the material 
world I hold as now proved by actual evidence. 
That it is in some way continuous with the world 
of ether I can well suppose." 

This is to say that Mr. Myers, in contemplating 
the cosmos, recognizes as its first three states the 
physical, the ethereal, and the spiritual. Each con- 
dition is natural. There are no startling and revo- 
lutionary changes. There is no lapse of conscious- 
ness. The absolute continuity of consciousness is 
the truth at the very foundation of our spiritual life. 

We need to disassociate the idea of our life 
from that of the duration of our physical life. 
Whether in the physical body and environment, or 



34 They Who Understand 

in the ethereal body and environment is im- 
material, just as one's changes of costume are im- 
material to his essential life and pursuits. 

The continuity of consciousness is as unbroken 
and as uninterrupted by the withdrawal from 
the physical mechanism as is the consciousness 
and the power of the musician by the loss of his 
piano or violin. 

The Gates of New Life are thrown open to the 
man who has passed from the physical to the 
ethereal worlds. It is all so natural to him that 
many persons, indeed, have to be convinced 
that they have made the Adventure Beautiful. 
Doctor William James is one who has said that 
he had to be led to look upon his physical body, 
as it lay on the bed, before lie could believe 
that he had passed on. In a communication 
received from William T. Stead (three days 
after the Titanic had gone down and two days 
before the arrival of the Carpathia in New York 
had brought tidings of certainty to any one), 
Mr. Stead, as recorded in another book of mine, 1 

14 'The Adventure Beautiful." Boston. Little, 
Brown, and Company, 1917. 



The Gates of New Life 35 

stated through the hand of a friend (who was 
not a professional psychic) that his dead son met 
him and assured him that he had passed into the 
next phase of life ; that he too was what we 
have called "dead." Continuing his automatic 
writing Mr. Stead added : " I looked down at 
myself; I looked as I always had; and I said, 
'Oh, no, this cannot be true.'' The remainder 
of the story, which I will not entirely reproduce 
here, was not only intensely interesting, but a 
narration to throw much light on the conditions 
beyond. 

Still more convincing is the instance, recorded 
in the same book, of the transition, and subsequent 
message regarding it, of Mrs. Sylvester Baxter 
(Lucia Millet, a sister of the well-known artist, 
Frank D. Millet), because the message from Mrs. 
Baxter included such verifiable matters as to be 
unmistakably evidential, even to the most 
sceptically searching inquiry. An early experi- 
ence of my own, occurring at sea, on the night 
of May 19, 1896, has always persisted in vivid 
memory. It was this : 

Wakened in the night by what seemed a cur- 



36 They Who Understand 

rent of electrical shock, I seemed to know (rather 
than see) that three figures stood near with an 
indescribable sense of joy and surprise; and 
the words, "Is this all? It is all over!" that 
(by some inner perception) I also seemed to 
know rather, even, than audibly to hear, 
were spoken by one who had just passed into 
the ethereal. Afterward I learned that this 
was the date coincident with the death of Kate 
Field. Some months later when, by the arrange- 
ment of Doctor Richard Hodgson, I had a series 
of seances with Mrs. Piper, Miss Field being the 
chief communicator, I asked her, at one time, to 
describe to me just what happened on her first 
consciousness of having withdrawn from the 
physical world. "I found myself standing on 
the floor," she said, "in the room in which they 
had laid my body on a long table. My mother 
stood by me, and said : ' Kate, my child, have no 
fear; come with me.' And she took me to the 
house where were my father and my br other.' ' 
In this connection Miss Field also said that in 
these first moments she thought of me, and that 
her mother told her she would show her the way 



The Gates of New Life 37 

to find me. My experience that night on ship- 
board was described through the automatic 
writing by Mrs. Piper's hand; although at that 
time it had never been made known. 

The general consensus of testimony is as to 
the absolute naturalness of the experiences on 
entering the Gates of New Life. The friends 
who have been known and loved on earth, and 
who have already passed on, meet the one newly 
arrived and explain and assist in the adjustment 
of the new conditions. To a preponderating 
degree the testimony is that almost the first 
thought and desire is to be able to make some 
sign or token to those left desolate on earth: 
to assure them of the perfect continuation of 
life and love. The success in conveying this as- 
surance rests with us as much as with them. If 
we are unable to respond to these higher vibra- 
tions of touch or tone or thought, they have no 
miraculous power to impress us with these 
manifestations. It must always be, for the most 
part, a spiritual recognition, and not any expect- 
ancy of physical phenomena. The highest order 
of communion between two is when both meet 



38 They Who Understand 

in aspiration and love and the nobler activities. 
There is no union of spirit comparable to the 
uniting for a noble purpose. Instead of that 
grief which saddens and pains those so infinitely 
dear, let the one left on earth enter on some 
special line of sympathetic and helpful work and 
call on the friend in the unseen to lend a hand. 
It will be amazing to see how difficulties are 
smoothed away; how circumstances will be 
adjusted ; how one will be prompted to take the 
right path, to meet the right person, to find the 
right book, — to be led through experiences 
which, while all natural, yet still combine to 
form a mosaic of complete preparation, or which 
further the achievement of the purpose in hand. 
The spiritual world is an inclusive phrase; it 
includes the present, in a discrete degree, as surely 
as the period beyond. To live the life of the 
spirit is to live in the spiritual world, whether 
here or hereafter. 

The interlude of friendship and companionship 
that exists during the period when one of the two 
who made up life for each other is in the ethereal 
and the other here may be made one of ineffable 



The Gates of New Life 39 

blessedness. It rests with ourselves to make it 
so. In the almost universal bereavements in this 
War a great opportunity is offered for entering 
into a higher spiritual consciousness. We best 
learn the divineness of life by entering into the 
divine realm. And this realm is open to each 
and all of us, at any moment. It is the realm of 
high and beautiful thought. 

" Blessed are the songful of soul ; 
They carry light and joy to shadowed lives. ,, 

To enter into the region of beautiful thought 
is to enter into the heavenly life. We build 
our own spiritual life, day by day; and thought 
is the material of which it is wrought. By 
dwelling on that which is irritating, annoying, 
sad, or depressing, we deplete our forces. We 
also create around us an atmosphere impenetrable 
to the more lofty and beautiful spiritual influences. 
And more, we injure those we love who are in 
this realm of thought and beauty. The Gates 
of New Life are open to all who lift life to the 
level of unbroken communion with the mystic, 
in-dwelling Christ. Nor is this mere phrasing. 



40 They Who Understand 

It is a work; it is a life work. Because the 
ordinary life in the physical world is inevitably 
full of all possibilities of discord. One does not 
need to offer any catalogue of the things just, 
or unjust, as may be, that are difficult, depressing, 
irritating. No one is free from these. But the 
effect they have upon our lives and conduct is 
within our own control. A man has been 
wronged, misrepresented, defrauded. He may 
be absolutely blameless. But the sooner and the 
more entirely he can banish it from his memory, 
the sooner he can forgive as well as forget, and 
the better for his spiritual progress. Sooner or 
later he must forgive, for that is the law. Is it 
not better to rise to this at once and thus enter 
on peace of mind again? 

The region entered by the Gates of New Life 
is a spiritual region. They who understand and 
thus keep to a high order of thought are spiritually 
companioned by their beloved who, being free 
from the physical discords, are dwelling therein. 
Nothing can separate those who inhabit the same 
atmosphere of thought. 

It is in this natural companionship of spirit 



The Gates of New Life 41 

that the most satisfactory communion is found. 
Meeting Edward Everett Hale soon after the 
death of his youngest son, Robert Beverly, who 
had been his most intimate and inseparable 
companion, Doctor Hale said, reaching out his 
hand with its warm and generous clasp, "You 
don't know how well I bear it ; Robbie is with me 
all the time. He walks the streets with me; 
he sits beside me in my study." By this, Doctor 
Hale meant the companionship of spiritual per- 
ception alone. He was not designating any 
phenomenal experience. His son was not visible 
to his physical sight, nor tangible to the touch of 
hand. But the spirit-to-spirit recognition was 
unerring. How could it be otherwise when the 
two were so closely conjoined by love and by 
temperamental affiliations? The spiritual self, 
with its increasing development of spiritual 
faculties, transcends the barrier of the physical 
encasement. It is the same order of direct 
communication that might be if two persons, 
muffled and enveloped in clothing and in masks, 
who could not see each other because of the cover- 
ing, were yet side by side and could converse 



42 They Who Understand 

together, directly, with no difficulty. The spirit 
language is evidently not words, but thought, 
although this thought is instantly and uncon- 
sciously translated into words. The impressions 
conveyed are beyond language ; yet they are 
translatable into language. 

One finds much trace of this order of com- 
munion with the invisible world among the Greeks. 
Plotinus, whose life on earth fell between 204 
and 269, a.d., thus relates an experience : 

"Often when I come to myself on awakening 
from bodily sleep, and, turning from the outer 
world, enter into myself, I behold wondrous 
beauty. Then I am sure that I have been con- 
scious of the better part of myself. I live my 
true life. I am one with the divine order and 
rooted in the divine. I gain the power to trans- 
port myself beyond even the super-world. After 
thus resting in God, when I descend from spiritual 
vision and again form thoughts, I ask myself 
how it has happened that I now descend and that 
my soul even entered the body at all, since, in 
its essence, it has just revealed itself to me? 
Man learns about divine things by leading his 



The Gates of New Life 43 

soul to know itself as spiritual that it may find 
its way, as a spirit, into the spiritual world." 

Porphyrius, a disciple of Plotinus (born in 
Syria, 233; died in Rome 304, a.d.), has thus 
spoken of his inner experiences : 

" The soul has the power to extend her activity 
to any locality she may desire. She is a power 
which has no limits and each part of her, being 
independent of special conditions, can be present 
everywhere, provided she is pure and un- 
adulterated with matter. " 

That is to say, the less a man is entangled with 
materiality, the more clear, direct, and potent are 
his spiritual power and spiritual perceptions. 
But let this idea be not misleading. A man i3 
not necessarily entangled with materiality, nor 
hindered from leading the life of the spirit, be- 
cause he is dealing with material things. He is in 
a physical world, and physical matters are his 
inevitable factors of achievement. The life of 
the spirit does not mean sinking into vagrancy, 
idleness, or pauperism. The life of the spirit 
may be led by the most vigilant laborer; by 
him who is delving in the mine or laying pave- 



44 They Who Understand 

ment in the streets ; by the man who is controlling 
vast and intricate industrial interests; who is 
commanding or serving in armies; who is in 
office, shop, study, or studio. The life of the 
spirit does not imply uselessness, but, instead, 
the highest degree of usefulness and efficiency. 
For the life of the spirit is in qualities; it is in 
justice, honesty, consideration, generosity. The 
man who is at the head of a great railway 
system, with its vast complication of the hu- 
man factor and the industrial and commercial 
responsibilities ; the man who is sending ships 
engaged in international traffic and transit 
across the ocean; the man who administers the 
power of carrying on manufactories and indus- 
tries; as well as the educator, the preacher, the 
philosopher, has every condition for living the 
life of the spirit. Let no one imagine that the 
path to the diviner life and the life of the spirit 
is in mere inaction ; on the contrary, it is the path 
in which one is charged with the highest energy. 
The conception that there is no compatibility 
between the life dealing with spiritual and that 
dealing with material things ; that the one must 



The Gates of New Life 45 

be chosen to the exclusion of the other, was the 
fallacy of medieval times. It was then believed 
that the life of the spirit was lived by the mendi- 
cant ; the material life by the producer. It was 
held that the life of the spirit could only be most 
truly lived in the seclusion of convent or mon- 
astery, while we now realize that the field is 
the world. Jesus lived no life apart. He went 
up into the mountains; He sought solitude at 
times for that unbroken communion of prayer 
that recharges the spirit with divine magnetism ; 
but he lived his life among men. He shared with 
them all that they could receive of spiritual riches. 
Man would not have been placed in a material 
world if he had not been intended to deal with 
its conditions. They constitute for him a 
school of discipline and training. The physical 
environment is the theater for all possible exercise 
of spiritual qualities. To become just, truthful, 
honorable, noble, — under what phase of dis- 
cipline could man better learn those lessons and 
develop those powers than just the conditions in 
which we now find ourselves ? But it is our con- 
sciousness and our increasing knowledge of the 



46 They Who Understand 

unseen which conduces to this increasingly higher 
life. It is the realization of the unbroken con- 
tinuity of life that sustains the spirit through dis- 
couragements and denials and defeats; that 
whispers the truth that these are but temporary ; 
"just a stuff to try the souPs strength on ;" that 
defeat and disaster are as valuable in relation to 
the wholeness of life as are triumph and pros- 
perity. It is the realization of this unbroken 
continuity, the purposes in view not interrupted 
by the change of death, that sustains and inspires 
human life. 



II 



THE UNBROKEN CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE 

"And tears are never for those who die with their 
face to the duty done." 

— John Boyle O'Reilly on "Wendell Phillips." 

NEVER was there a time when the world 
so eagerly questioned about the nature 
of the next phase of life as now, when 
these untold thousands of our youth have sud- 
denly been passing from the battlefield into the 
ethereal realm. The research into the super- 
physical has become an enormous quest. It is 
not irrational to believe that this is one of the 
results for which the War was here. For, that the 
most appalling conflict in all history came upon 
us by chance is not a tenable conclusion. Nu- 
merous are the reasons assigned, as formulated 
by statesmen and moralists. 

One writer, in an able analysis of the political 
and economic causes for the most appalling trag- 

47 



48 They Who Understand 

edy that the world has ever known, sums up all 
these reasons in one, — " man's failure to live as 
God commands/ ' Nor can this be regarded as a 
mere phrase of rhetoric. "God's command" 
is a law as inescapable as is the law of gravita- 
tion. He who breaks it must suffer the penalty. 
We find the writer saying : 

"... I have heard the statement that just 
previous to the War civilization was at its highest 
stage; mankind had evolved — developed, if 
you like — to a point never before attained ; 
education was more general than had been known ; 
even the spirit of charity was evident in all lands, 
among all races ; in fact, the world was going very 
well and the dawn of a better day was clearly 
visible. Therefore, such a climax of horror and 
suffering, such a tempest of the brutal instincts 
of primitive man, seems to be a negative answer 
to man's well-founded hope of a better and a 
brighter day. ... If a few years ago a prophet 
had declared what the world would see during 
1914-1919, he would have been judged by the 
majority of mankind fit for the asylum." 

The special command that man has broken is 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 49 

cited as the law, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself." Justice and consideration are en- 
joined; but selfishness has largely ruled. Now 
if the teachings of Jesus regarding the conduct 
of human affairs are of any value they are practi- 
cable. If they are not practicable, they are of 
no value. The counsel to love one's neighbor 
as one's self is not that of a fanatic. It is the 
counsel of simple justice. Emerson notes that a 
time comes in a man's development when he is 
careful that his neighbor shall not cheat him. 
At a still higher degree of development he is care- 
ful that he shall not cheat his neighbor. The 
student of Emerson finds that he continually 
affirms the solidarity of society. "It is as great 
a loss to me that others should be low as that I 
should be low," we find him saying, "for I must 
have society." It is an entirely practicable ideal 
suggested in the counsel of Phillips Brooks : " Be 
such a man, live such a life, that if every man 
lived as you do, this earth would be heaven." All 
these ideals are intimations of a marvelous reality 
on whose threshold we stand. 

It is nothing less than the threshold of an 



50 They Who Understand 

entirely new comprehension of the nature, the 
progress, the destiny of human life. 

One signal factor in this new initiation has 
been the service of Frederic W. H. Myers, whose 
place in the world of letters as a scholar of the 
finest classical culture, a critical thinker, and a 
poet, was so widely recognized as to give due pres- 
tige to an incident in his life which has led to far- 
reaching consequences. 

It was on the evening of December 3, 1869, 
that Mr. Myers and Professor Sidgwick were 
out together for a starlit walk. Mr. Myers was 
a young man of twenty-six. Of this walk he 
afterward said to a friend, "I asked Sidgwick 
almost with trembling whether he thought that 
when tradition, intuition, metaphysics had failed 
to solve the riddle of the universe there was still 
a chance that from any observable phenomena — ■ 
ghosts, spirits, whatsoever there might be — 
some valid knowledge might be drawn as to a 
world unseen. Already, it seemed, he had thought 
it possible; . . . and from that night onward I 
resolved to pursue this quest." Thus was 
initiated, in that one moment, the signal pur- 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 51 

pose of his life. Mr. Myers held the con- 
viction that if a spiritual world ever had been 
manifested to man it must be manifest in the 
present just the same. He more or less clearly 
perceived that the entire life, the energy, of every 
day depended upon some influence from the un- 
seen. Was there in man "an abiding psychical 
entity far more extensive than he knows, — an 
individuality which can never express itself com- 
pletely through any corporeal manifestation"? 
Could the spiritual man function separately from 
his physical body? Was the real personality 
capable of being liberated from its material or- 
ganism? Was there truth to reward him who 
should diligently search in the mysterious realms 
of occult phenomena? Was the man, the spirit- 
ual man, in reality independent of his physi- 
cal organism? Nothing less than this was the 
sublime quest on which Frederic Myers set out 
from that night. When (on January 17, 1901, in 
Rome) he passed into the unseen, did he find the 
answer to his life's questioning ? The little tablet 
placed to his memory in the English cemetery 
in the Eternal City, forever poetically consecrated 



52 They Who Understand 

by the ashes of Keats and Shelley, bears this 
fitting inscription: "He asked life of Thee, and 
Thou gavest him long life ever and forever." 

At all events Myers dedicated his life, his 
genius, to this inquiry. Flournoy well says of 
the spiritistic doctrine of Myers, "If future dis- 
coveries confirm his thesis of the intervention of 
the discarnate in the web and woof of our mental 
and physical worlds, then will his name be in- 
scribed in the golden book of the initiated, and, 
joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, he 
will complete the triad of geniuses who have the 
most profoundly revolutionized scientific thought, 
in the order, Cosmological, Biological, Psycho- 
logical." 

That epoch-making book, "Human Person- 
ality ", which Mr. Myers left as his imperishable 
legacy to mankind, and which was not published 
until after its author had passed from the realm 
of questioning to the realm of replies, is an en- 
cyclopaedia of the most profound and scientific 
investigation of phenomena. It is scientific, it 
is philosophic, it is religious. Its depth and sin- 
cerity of religious tone impart to its scientific 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 53 

and philosophical scope an irresistible claim to 
value. The author studies the problem of telep- 
athy as to whether this is the law of the direct 
intercommunion of the spiritual man; whether 
it is a supreme truth, reuniting all beings, — those 
in the physical realm, those who have withdrawn 
from that realm, — whether it is the law that 
unites them all "in a splendid universe of moral 
and spiritual life"? The problem of the sub- 
liminal consciousness; the problems of duty, 
prayer, life eternal, and all their relations to the 
life that now is, as well as to that which is to come ; 
the mystery of genius; these, and other vital 
questions are marvelously discussed in these two 
large volumes of "Human Personality.'' 

Now life may be defined as the adventure of the 
spirit into temporary conditions which are ever 
increasing in significance and enlarging in their 
horizons; or which decrease in significance and 
power of satisfaction, and whose horizons narrow 
instead of enlarge, according to the personal 
power that is brought to bear upon them. This 
power is increased or decreased in its nature by 
the degree of the goodness and intelligence, or of 



54 They Who Understand 

the evil and the ignorance of the man himself. 
For all objective conditions are fluctuating and 
are relative to the degree of individual control. 
There are certain laws of nature which are fixed, 
as the law of gravitation, for instance. In rela- 
tion to these, man must control his own attitude. 
He cannot defy the law without suffering the 
penalty, but it is in his power to control his own 
attitude in relation to the law. The fluctu- 
ating conditions of health, or illness; of some 
reasonable degree of success and prosperity, or 
failure and privation; the achievement of in- 
creasing stores of knowledge, or the remaining 
in ignorance, — all these and others which need 
not be cited are a part of " the flowing conditions 
of life" over which the individual may also exer- 
cise an increasing control. Even the momentous 
question of immortality (in its differentiation 
from merely continued existence) is subject to 
the power of the individual. For immortality is 
not merely being alive after the change of death ; 
it is the condition of being alive now! It is a 
matter of spiritual vitality. To be just, consider- 
ate, sympathetic; to hold service as one of the 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 55 

priceless privileges; to be generous rather than 
selfish ; responsive rather than indifferent ; truth- 
ful and noble in every respect, to be active in 
all that makes for the usefulness and happiness of 
the largest possible number, to keep one's spirit 
in sensitive response to the guidance of the Divine 
Spirit — this is to be immortal in the present. Im- 
mortality is not a condition, not a locality. The 
question is not so much, Shall we be immortal? 
as it is, Are we immortal at this moment? Im- 
mortality is something to be achieved and in- 
creased by living in the sympathies and the activi- 
ties that create immortality. In so much greater 
measure, then, as one has developed these quali- 
ties of the spirit before death, is he the more fitted 
to enter on this next higher plane of life. "Let 
this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus " — 
that mind that is love, joy, peace, righteousness. 
To "bear much fruit" in that the Father may be 
glorified is to live in the widest relations with 
one's fellow beings ; to render the service needed 
at the moment, not counting the cost; to give 
the gift that is helpful, though it leave one's own 
hands empty. For spiritual treasure is infinite, 



56 They Who Understand 

and to him who lives in the spirit the supply is 
sure. Human life is potentially divine life. Re- 
ligion, in its highest possibilities, is a life and not 
a litany, although the litany gives its strength 
and support and direction to life. 

It could not be assumed that the founding of the 
Society for Psychical Research in 1882, some 
years after the resolution of Frederic Myers to 
devote his life to the quest outlined above, was 
in itself the initiation of a new and higher 
spirituality of life ; but that it has been a contrib- 
uting cause no one can deny. The last quarter 
of the nineteenth century revealed many phases 
of new ethical movements. The reconcilement 
of science and religion began ; they were seen to be 
not mutually antagonistic, but complementary 
and mutually supporting. Theosophy arose, 
offering a great explanation of the phenomena 
of the universe; of the problem of the origin, 
progress, and destiny of the soul. Spiritualistic 
phenomena had opened the way for more from 
the mid-century years. Accepted, or denied, it 
challenged attention. It became a factor in reli- 
gious life. All these movements, and the increas- 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 57 

ing enlightenment of humanity, created a moral 
preparation for a more highly developed order 
of human life. 

Now here we see the contrast of two great 
opposing forces advancing towards the future : 
Germany, with her imperialistic and military 
ideals teaching the doctrine that Might, not Right, 
is the arbiter of national destinies; England, 
France, America, Italy, and other nations imbued 
with a purer ethical purpose. How could the 
advance of two such utterly opposite movements, 
— the one for physical domination, the other for 
moral and spiritual domination, — result in any- 
thing else than a terrible conflict ? 

For what was this War? Had it not aspects 
unknown to the historic past, and that brand it 
as a new order of human tragedy? "For we 
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against 
principalities, against powers, against the rulers 
of the darkness of this world, against spiritual 
wickedness in high places." Then what remains ? 
What can we do ? 

In this War we encountered not men ; we en- 
countered fiends from Hades. The editor of a 



58 They Who Understand 

leading American journal thus characterizes the 
Prussian policy : 

" ' The enemy must be thoroughly engaged at 
once.' Nothing could better illustrate the nau- 
seating hypocrisy, the bloodless formalism un- 
convincingly covering a bloodthirsty savagery 
which so constantly characterizes the Prussian 
beast. Who are 'the enemy ' that are to be 
'thoroughly engaged'? Are they fighting men 
who can fight back? Not a bit of it. They 
are unarmed, non-combatant messengers of mercy 
— ambulance men risking their lives in the al- 
ways perilous No Man's Land that they may 
perhaps ease the pain or save the life of some 
tortured and helpless human being ripped open 
by shrapnel or left with a bullet-shattered limb, 
suffering through terrible hours the torments of 
the damned ! These heroes of pity, standing 
right up in the daylight, human targets that can- 
not be missed, men who have not fired and will 
not fire a shot in this war, are to be mercilessly 
mowed down by machine guns. . . . 

"So this official order to leave the dead un- 
coffined and the wounded uncared for comes as 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 59 

no surprise. It is the proper fruit of the upas 
tree. It is akin to the deliberate and officially 
ordered bombing of hospitals. It is typical of 
Prussian militarism. It is precisely the sort of 
thing that our young men have sailed away across 
the Atlantic to uproot and finally destroy. 

"The German army! What is it in reality? 
A collection of cowards who shoot down Red 
Cross men, ruffians who rob and 'beat up' 
helpless civilians, beasts who mutilate children, 
criminals who poison wells and even give deadly 
sweets to babies, torturers who crucify prisoners 
and abuse wounded enemies. 

"Leave the dead unburied! Abandon the 
wounded to writhe in agony under the burning 
midsummer sun, without water, without succor, 
without pity ! Shoot down the Red Cross 
stretcher-parties ! These are official German 
orders. This is the sort of enemy our boys fought 
in France." 

In this startling presentation of the powers of 
darkness which our young men nobly sprang to 
overcome is revealed the conditions they met. 
Then what follows ? 



60 They Who Understand 

"Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of 
God, that ye may be able to withstand in the 
evil day and having done all, to stand." For this 
world is being prepared for the diviner life to come 
in. The ethical forces had long been gathering 
new strength and manifesting themselves in new 
forms of activity ; the materialistic and inhuman 
forces of Prussian militarism had also long been 
gathering new strength and manifesting them- 
selves in increasing activities. The conflict was 
inevitable. The Powers of Evil closed in a deadly 
grapple with the Powers of Good. The Powers 
of Darkness and the Powers of Light were in their 
conflict. 

It was to this awful combat that the Flower of 
American youth went forth. The hour is conse- 
crated with their holy knighthood. 

"And tears are never for those who die with 
their face to the duty done ! " 

The material, the spiritual, were arrayed against 
each other. It was such a conflict as no age of 
the world ever witnessed before. For evil forces 
and righteous forces cannot dwell together. And 
the reason th^y cannot longer dwell together in 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 61 

any semblance of peace lies deeper still. It is that 
humanity itself has now advanced to that degree 
of spiritual development that requires for its 
existence and nurture a purer environment. No 
nation is wholly righteous, or without grave sins 
against the ideal state. Humanity has developed 
to that higher degree when it can no longer con- 
done its own sins, whatever they may be. Tem- 
perance, economic and social justice, must now 
come. It is the law and the prophets. History 
reveals that at intervals of about two thousand 
years there appears some order of a restatement 
of spiritual truth; a new manifestation; a new 
call to "Turn to the Lord and live." For in God 
alone is life. 

"For Evil, in its nature, is decay, 

And any hour may blot it all away." 

May it not be true that now, at the approach 
of two thousand years from the appearance of 
Jesus, the Christ, a new wave of spirituality sweeps 
over the land? But does so divine a thing as 
spirituality of life manifest itself in aspects too 
appalling for reference ? The tragedy of Belgium ; 



62 They Who Understand' 

of the Lusitania, of countless atrocities, are these 
the pledge and prophecy of a new wave of spirit- 
uality ? The association of the two is unthinkable 
and incredible. So we might rationally say. 
There is a mystery still deeper than this. May we 
try to penetrate it, in however feeble a measure ? 
It is an established truth that God works 
through orderly laws. Evolution, not revolu- 
tion, rules the kingdom of nature. If we sow 
wheat we do not reap a harvest of tares. Cause 
and effect go hand in hand in orderly sequence. 
But the very advent of a higher wave of spiritual- 
ity forces a deadly conflict with the evil that is 
in the world, both individually and nationally. 
If a man to-day rise to a new height of spiritual 
power, what is the first effect ? It is to extermi- 
nate the sin that he had yesterday. If he were 
unjust yesterday he must free himself from in- 
justice to-day. Now the very degree of moral 
development that humanity has achieved will no 
longer tolerate the sins that civilization, up to this 
time, has tolerated. The very good focuses the 
evil. The conflict was inevitable. The causes 
had existed in the immaterial world. They were 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 63 

recognized by the spiritual consciousness of man- 
kind. They encountered the invisible challenge 
of this higher moral consciousness, and they crys- 
tallized and formulated themselves for the awful 
conflict. 

On the higher plane the War was a spiritual 
drama. We have talked of Armageddon; we 
saw it before us. The Forces of Good, the Forces 
of Evil, met in their grapple. Now, in relation 
to the youth who have leaped forward into this 
conflict ; whose noble purpose, whose high en- 
thusiasm, whose devotion to lofty ideals have led 
them on, — what is revealed to us when they sac- 
rifice their physical life in this tragic struggle ? 

This is revealed : that these gallant young spirits 
have forever allied themselves with all that makes 
for righteousness ; that their devotion to true ideals 
has consecrated itself by seal and sign eternal ! 

They have died that the noblest ideals of hu- 
manity shall live ! What ineffable blessedness is 
theirs ! What ineffable blessedness is ours by all 
that sharing of their nobleness through undying 
love ! 

Humanity has now achieved that degree of 



64 They Who Understand 

spiritual development which requires a finer and 
purer environment. That is what this War, 
effacing and exterminating old conditions and 
creating new ones, is to give us. A world remade 
beckons us on in a not remote future. It will not 
be a sudden transformation. We shall not close 
our eyes in sleep on the world as it is and awaken 
in the morning to find it transformed to paradise. 
But that we are at that standpoint, even now, 
when all conditions for life are contemplated from 
a loftier range of vision and estimated by purer 
ideals, could hardly be denied. The larger 
recognition of the spiritual forces of life in the 
scale of the practicable and the applicable is, in 
itself, a signal advance of the race. It is not the 
lack of sound judgment, but the test and the sign 
of the sound and wise judgment to recognize 
unseen forces as those whose influences are the 
determining and the permanent. The hardships 
of the physical life increase; physical resources 
constantly become more difficult to compass. 
What then? Are we to learn that beyond the 
physical, — in the superphysical realm, — exists 
an infinite supply on which, hitherto, man has 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 65 

drawn to only a very slight extent? Are we to 
recognize that when Emerson said, in reply to an 
assertion that the world was coming to an end, 
that he "could get along without it ", the remark 
is not mere wit and persiflage, but states an 
wholly practicable truth? We relinquish the 
physical resources of life to an increasing extent. 
They grow more difficult, more impossible for us 
to compass. The high and ever higher prices of 
food, clothing, shelter, — the three primary neces- 
sities of life, — suggest to one the wonder as to 
how he is to continue on this planet at all! 
Travel becomes so expensive that he vaguely 
contemplates his restriction to such portion of the 
earth's surface as he may be able to traverse on 
his two feet. What is to be the end? Are we 
to be crowded off the earth altogether ? 

This brings us to the verge of the recognition 
of the true nature of our life. 

Man is a spiritual being and an inhabitant of 
the spiritual universe. It is only in the most 
temporary and fragmentary sense that he is a 
physical being and an inhabitant of the physical 
universe. His nature is so largely adjusted to 



66 They Who Understand 

respond to higher realms that the fact of being, as 
it were, compelled to transfer much of his life, 
here and now, to those higher realms, cannot be 
a misfortune. It is as if he were inhabiting only 
the lower floor of his dwelling, while above were 
successive floors far more delightful. But he 
remains on the accustomed level and will not be 
persuaded to mount higher. Suddenly floods 
come ; or fire invades his familiar interior, and to 
escape destruction he must ascend to the next 
story of his house. Once bestowing himself there 
he finds it far more desirable ; but he would never 
have made this change had he not been forced 
into it. Is it not possible that this analogy ex- 
plains the present condition of humanity? Are 
we not being forced to a higher level of life ? Our 
real world is that among the unseen potencies 
and under superphysical conditions. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century people 
were crossing the continent to the Pacific coast in 
conveyances drawn by horses. A quarter of a 
century later they were crossing it in railway 
trains. The steam engine had taken its own place. 
Morse invented the telegraph which carried mes- 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 67 

sages with a rapidity undreamed of before. 
Marconi perfected the system of sending messages 
through the ether. We have learned to navigate 
the air and to sail under the surface of the water. 
The horse is superseded by the motor car. En- 
tering into the use of the more subtle mechanical 
forces, man will also develop and use the more 
spiritual forces in application to his personal life. 
Immortality is more in increasing degrees of con- 
sciousness than it is the question of duration. He 
who lives in a more abounding spiritual conscious- 
ness, now and here, is thereby more immortal. 
For in consciousness is the true life. 

And then? Then it is for us, for those in the 
seen and in the unseen, to unite in building a new 
world. If the War leaves us no better than it 
found us, all its appalling tragedy and suffering 
and its incalculable loss will have been in vain. 
Are we to take up life again on no higher round ? 
Not so. The evolution of a nobler civilization 
is working itself out on lines of harmony with the 
eternal purpose. All the ease and pleasure and 
joyfulness of life that seemed so innocent and so 
full of enjoyment was yet deteriorating if it tended 



68 They Who Understand 

to retard this nobler progress into the new civili- 
zation ; if we rested content in it, knowing how 
imperfect was its structure ; knowing that it har- 
bored economic injustice, selfishness, self-indul- 
gence; that it tolerated sins of omission and 
commission. Yet it was a pleasant, easy-going 
life, with an abundance of charity, even if not 
over-abundant in justice ; not without its nobler 
aims, even with rather prevailing ideals of having 
a good time. For the most part all fairly well-to- 
do people had a very good time, indeed. In the 
old, easy-going sense of those days, no one has a 
good time now. Those good times were not, in 
themselves, evil, but if they were retarding the 
more noble organization of society, then they 
should give way to these more difficult conditions 
which are yet doing the nobler work in forcing a 
more just and a finer adjustment of national life. 
Not unfrequently is destruction the initial step 
toward regeneration. 

Two forces are now in mortal combat ; one is 
evolving the divine harmony ; one is opposing and 
retarding that evolution. What service is being 
rendered by this retarding agency? It is within 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 69 

the personal choice of each man to identify him- 
self with that which is advancing all that is noblest 
in life, or with that force which is opposing it. 

"See, I have set before thee this day life and 
good and death and evil ; . . . I call heaven and 
earth to record this day against you, that I have 
set before you life and death, blessing and cursing ; 
therefore choose life. . . . That thou mayest 
love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest 
obey his voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto 
him; for he is thy life, and the length of thy 
days; . . ." 

And again : 

" Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor 
be afraid of them : for the Lord thy God, he it is 
that doth go with thee ; he will not fail thee, nor 
forsake thee." 

To identify one's self with the forces of higher 
progress which are those of the life and good, as 
against those which are for death and evil is to 
go on in an unbroken continuity of experience, 
whether in the body or out of the body. The 
spiritual man has thus identified himself with that 
which is permanent and immortal. 



70 They Who Understand 

" . . . What is excellent, 
As God lives, is permanent." 

For it is that which is — 

"Built of tears and sacred flames, 
And virtue reaching to its aims ; 
Built of furtherance and pursuing ; 
Not of spent deeds, but of doing." 

To the soul that has chosen life and good, that 
has identified itself with the highest, the chrism 
of the divinest joy is given. It has been finely 
said of our soldiers that they died that the nation 
might live. But beyond this is an even greater 
truth, — they died that they themselves might 
live! That they thus attained to a life so far 
more abundant than that which they have laid 
down that their joy is full. 

"Never were there so many knights, or so 
noble," we find Doctor Stires again saying; "but 
all grateful for the honor of serving, and all ready 
to conquer death with a shout or a smile, and 
gladly to cross the frontier for the higher service. 
It is light, light, everywhere light, and no dark- 
ness at all." 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 71 

These who make the Adventure Beautiful have 
thereby so made themselves a component part of 
the nobler order of life that in this brief time they 
have thus compassed the spiritual development 
ordinarily only achieved through a long period 
of discipline. We can only hold fast to our 
invincible faith in God. The "dreams of the joy 
of dear ones in the Life eternal", as so tenderly 
phrased in some preceding citation from Doctor 
Stires, are, in reality, spiritual insights and spirit- 
ual visions. They are glimpses into the divine 
realities which God permits us to enjoy for our 
sustaining and our courage to still press on. 
Nor are these visions in a merely symbolic sense. 
Actual knowledge of those in the unseen is wholly 
possible. Actual communion with them, spirit 
to spirit, may be enjoyed. Love is the supreme 
and irresistible potency, and where love unites, 
all the powers of earth and air are powerless to 
divide those who are thus united. 

The release of the spiritual man from his physi- 
cal body is not to uncomprehended conditions. 
Science gives us definite knowledge of the ethereal 
environment. Consciousness is not a function 



72 They Who Understand 

of the physical brain, but a function that manifests 
itself by means of the physical brain, although it 
is as independent of this instrument and as much 
greater than can be thus manifested, as the musi- 
cian is independent of his piano or violin ; or as 
his resources of music to manifest are as far greater 
than any instrument can afford him adequate 
scope for producing. The question of the order 
of life immediately succeeding the life on earth 
is a much larger one than that involving the fact 
of communication alone. It demands a more 
adequate comprehension of the very nature of 
life itself. Sir Oliver Lodge says of death that it 
is "an important and momentous event, truly, 
even as birth is ; a waking up to new conditions, 
like a more thorough emigration than can be taken 
on a planet ; but no destruction, no lessening of 
power. Rather an enhancement of existence, an 
awakening from this earthly dream, a casting off 
of the trammels of the flesh, the realization of a 
body more adapted to the needs of an emancipated 
spirit, the entering on a wider field of service, 
the uniting with the many who have gone on be- 
fore." 



The Unbroken Continuity of Experience 73 

Communication between the two states is no 
longer to be regarded as either apart from the reli- 
gious life, or as chiefly identified with scientific 
investigation ; but as a natural aspect of the inter- 
relations. For the joys of companionship are 
not ended with the passing of one into the life 
beyond; a new order of companionship may be 
established, with its ineffable sweetness and satis- 
faction and inspiring joy.* 



Ill 

EVIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION AND PROOF 

"I transport myself to your side and say, speaking 
just as you would to any friend, ' Come, I have some- 
thing to say to you.' I insist until you fairly hear my 
voice. The flesh is stubborn, and it is often almost 
impossible to make myself heard. . . . All space is 
peopled with spiritual beings. When you leave the 
body you enter this space (as you call it) but which is 
more solid than a million earths, and all the planets 
of the universe are but as a pebble in comparison. 
Death has a great work to perform. Every plan, every 
movement, is directed from this side. All the discov- 
eries, all the new inventions, are projected from here. 
Our surroundings are adapted to our uses. We have 
homes and houses and gardens and streets ; but there 
are mysteries here beyond your power to comprehend. 
As one rises from realm to realm all things become 
grander and more beautiful." 

COMMUNICATION between those in the 
unseen and in the seen is so abundantly 
proven that from this time on, in all 
discussion of the matter in these pages, it will 
be taken for granted. If the modern evidence 
that has accumulated in such vast volume within 

74 



Evidential Communication and Proof 75 

the past sixty years, to say nothing of the records 
of the Bible and of the entire world, indeed, 
from all earliest time, — if all this evidence has 
not established its existence, the offering of any 
additional matter would be useless. Communi- 
cation is as well attested as is the working of 
the telegraph. Its experience in some form is 
an almost universal one. These experiences 
occur to those who believe and to those who do 
not believe. 

The invisible world penetrates the visible, 
and throngs of beings we do not see surround us 
constantly. The reason we do not see them is 
because the etheric body is in a state of too high 
vibration to be registered by the physical eye. 
In another book 1 I have endeavored to present 
the scientific explanation of this in full detail. 
In the two chapters in that book, "The Powers 
of the Ethereal Body", and "The Nature of the 
Ethereal World", it was the aim to make this 
clearly comprehensible from the basis of actual 
laboratory experiments and from the latest scien- 

1,4 The Adventure Beautiful.'/ Boston. Little, 
Brown, and Company, 1917. 



76 They Who Understand 

tific data as evolved by psychic research. In a 
word, as has already been said, the physical 
eye and the physical ear respond to only a limited 
range of vibration; and all that is above or be- 
low that range cannot therefore be either seen 
or heard. The extension of sight by means of 
the telescope above the range of the eye, or by 
the microscope below its range, will readily 
occur to all. Thus those who have withdrawn 
from the physical plane may be about us, although 
their presence is not reported by the senses. 
Clairvoyants claim that they encounter in the 
public streets as many inhabitants of the ethereal 
world as of this. The psychology of the future 
must take cognizance of the development of 
spiritual perceptions as they become factors in 
all present experience. The organic spiritual 
body that pervades the physical body, that has 
corresponding organs and powers, must be 
reckoned with. Death is merely the process 
of separation between these two bodies. The 
testimony of the senses in regard to a vast range 
of life is so restricted and limited as to be worth- 
less. Who has ever seen or touched electricity? 



Evidential Communication and Proof 77 

What could be the testimony of the eye, unaided 
by the telescope and the spectroscope, regard- 
ing the sidereal system? Epes Sargent, one of 
the most notable thinkers of the nineteenth 
century, after presenting a long and convincing 
array of evidence for the existence and recogni- 
tion of the ethereal (or spirit) body, says : 

"From the facts here brought together, it 
may be inferred that the spirit body is not a 
mere hypothesis; it is proved by the phenom- 
ena and the inductions of evidence; by the 
objective appearance of spiritual beings; by 
the testimony of clairvoyants who can see them, 
and by the testimony of spiritual beings them- 
selves, who claim not only a super-ethereal 
organism, human in its form, but the power 
of assuming visible bodies like those which at 
different stages of the earth life they had while 
here; by the phenomena of somnambulism and 
clairvoyance giving evidence of spiritual senses, 
for as the bodily senses imply their object, so 
do the spiritual senses imply theirs, and are 
prophecies of an endless life ; by all the analogies 
that reason and experience supply; and by the 



78 They Who Understand 

belief of men in all ages and climes, — a belief 
founded on the actual reappearance of those who 
have died. 

"Add to these considerations the facts of a 
manifold consciousness pointing to a complex 
but unique organism; also the marvels of mem- 
ory, in which faulty impressions inhere and per- 
sist which are inexplicable under the theory of 
materialism, involving as it does a constant flux 
and removal of the molecules of the organs of 
thought. Only the existence of a spiritual body 
can account for these things." 

As a matter of fact the War, thus precipitating 
such an enormous number into the next phase 
of life, compels consideration of their immediate 
conditions and of their relations to the visible 
world. The psychical experiences connected with 
the War are already numerous. 

Recently Mrs. D. Parker, of Herts, England, 
was engaged in some household duty when sud- 
denly she heard her son's voice calling "Mother", 
as if in great pain. The son was a private in a 
Middlesex regiment. So real was the voice that 
she dropped her work and hastened down-stairs, 



Evidential Communication and Proof 79 

feeling that he must have arrived. The call 
was repeated, but she found no one. His letters 
ceased, and she felt as sure that he had passed 
from this life as she did after receiving, some days 
later, a notification from the War Office that he 
had been missing since April 24th, the date on 
which she had heard the voice. For a time no. 
word reached her; then a neighbor received a 
letter from another soldier saying that an Aus- 
tralian battalion had found the dead body of 
young Parker and had given it a military funeral 
and burial. 

A young American lady, Miss Annie Haider- 
man of New York City, was in London in the 
winter of 1915-1916, and was one of many of 
the noble women who "adopted" a soldier in the 
ranks for whom to personally care. Miss Haider- 
man's charge was a Belgian, and later he was 
killed on the field. After her return to New York 
Miss Halderman (whose own beauty of life is an 
ideal of womanhood) still kept in communication 
with his wife, who had been left with young chil- 
dren and to whom the sympathy and care given 
to the dead father was continued. By associating 



80 They Who Understand 

herself with one or two other friends Miss Haider- 
man was enabled to assure the widow continued 
aid that the children might be educated and 
cared for. One night she was awakened by the 
feeling of a presence, and in the darkness there 
came before her distinctly the face of a man which 
remained visible long enough for her to perfectly 
see and remember the countenance. A little 
while after, the widow, in a letter of gratitude, 
inclosed a photograph of her dead husband, 
saying she felt that he would be glad that Miss 
Halderman should have it. It was the face 
that had appeared to her ! 

This occurrence seems to indicate that he 
fully understood the aid that was being extended 
to his wife and children ; that he wished the kind 
and generous friend to know that he was aware 
of it ; that he was in some way enabled to make 
his face visible to her, and that he influenced 
his wife to send the photograph that she might 
identify the face she had seen. 

As a matter of fact, the relations between the 
inhabitants of the two realms are far more simple 
and natural than has been fully realized. There 



Evidential Communication and Proof 81 

is no such separation as is often believed. Nor 
is communication limited to that which is strik- 
ingly supernormal. There is, without doubt, 
a very large body of communication that is 
seldom recognized as such because it comes 
in so entirely natural a manner. It comes into 
one's mind, so to speak, and is either accepted 
as one's own individual thought, or as coming 
from some unformulated source. And it is also 
true that one cannot prove, even to himself, in 
many of these cases, whether the matter is, or is 
not, generated by his own mind. But there are 
also many cases when the thought, the prompt- 
ing, or the information so links itself with objec- 
tive things, unknown at the time to the individual, 
that he can identify the communication as com- 
ing from some one in the unseen and often can 
even identify the source from whence it comes. 
Such an instance as this is related by Emma 
Hardinge Britten, of England, whose initial 
essays in the world of effort were on the musical 
and dramatic stage, but whose native psychic 
gift came to so dominate her that she became an 
eminent medium. Born in affluence and cul- 



82 They Who Understand 

ture, Emma Hardinge found herself, in early- 
girlhood, left, at the death of her father, with- 
out resources, and she, with her mother, came to 
New York. During the voyage they came to 
know one of the officers of the ship, who offered, 
on his next crossing, to bring to Miss Hardinge a 
package that an English friend desired to send. 
The time came when the steamer would have 
been approximately due, but no alarm was felt 
at a little delay, as the sailing was in the winter, 
and ships at that time were frequently some days 
late if they encountered severe storms. But one 
evening she felt the presence of some one unseen 
whom she seemed to recognize intuitively as 
this young officer; and it came into her mind 
that the ship had gone down and that all on 
board were lost. There was nothing visible nor 
audible; but to the inner sense all this seemed 
to be made clear. She even felt a sensation as 
of icy water. Yet nothing that could be classed 
as phenomena occurred. The information was 
not conveyed with the definiteness of the clair- 
audient voice, or of automatic writing. But, 
as a matter of fact, the ship was never heard from. 



Evidential Communication and Proof 83 

There were no "S.O.S." calls possible in those 
days. That she went down with all on board 
the unbroken silence alone attested. It does 
not require a faith that degenerates into credulity 
to fully accept the apparent happening that the 
officer came to Miss Hardinge and communicated 
to her his fate. 

A remarkable instance of communication is 
related by George Thompson, M.P., of London. 
Mr. Thompson, recognized as an eloquent speaker 
in Parliament, came to this country as an anti- 
slavery speaker, in the decade of 1850-1860. 
At one time he was the guest of Isaac Post, who, 
with his family, had been much interested in 
the spiritualistic phenomena produced through 
the medium of the Fox sisters, and through 
whose hand was automatically written the book 
entitled "Light from the Spirit- World.' ' At 
the invitation of Mr. Post, Mr. Thompson had a 
seance with the eldest of the sisters. Some years 
before this Mr. Thompson had been in Hindu- 
stan on a government commission and had made 
some personal friends among the Hindoos, two 
or three of whom had since passed tp the beyond. 



84 They Who Understand 

It occurred to him that if he could get a message 
from any one of these it would be a real test. 
He mentally inquired if any of them were present, 
and three affirmative raps followed. His re- 
quest for a message was also answered in the 
same way, and the signal was given for using 
the alphabet. This was a tedious process, but 
one that was much employed in the early days 
of messages ; it consisted of repeating the alphabet 
until the signal of a rap indicated the right letter, 
and thus words were spelled. Mr. Thompson 
began repeating the letters and received the 
first signal at the letter "d", followed by the 
letters "w-a-r-k-a-n-t-h-t-a-g-o-r-e-e." Mr. Post 
remarked that this was a totally meaningless 
medley, and that there must be some mistake. 
He advised his friend to try again. Mr. Thomp- 
son studied the slip of paper on which he had 
written down these apparently unconnected 
letters, and then exclaimed "Dwarkanth 
Tagoree!" For here was the Hindoo name in 
full. Mr. Thompson uttered some friendly words 
of surprise and delight, to which a shower of raps 
responded. Tagoree had been a friend especially 



Evidential Communication and Proof 85 

prized; a man of unusual ability and goodness 
and also a Hindoo of high rank. By means of 
the tedious, yet reasonably direct process of the 
alphabet, a conversation of some half hour's 
duration ensued. Mr. Thompson put some 
questions to test the alleged identity. One of 
these was as to a gift sent by the Hindoo friend 
to Mr. Thompson's wife. The correct answer 
(a cashmere shawl) was spelled out. The Hindoo 
had visited London, and Mr. Thompson asked 
for the place they had last met? The reply 
named the place correctly (Regent Street), and 
one or two other test questions met an equally 
true reply. 

The "Undiscovered Country" is no longer un- 
discovered or unexplored. But its true nature 
is only recognized through spiritual perceptions 
and aspirations. An interesting editorial article 
in the New York Tribune for August 4, 1918, 
conveyed a surprised but yet enforced recogni- 
tion of the rapidly increasing interest and belief 
in the realities of communication between the 
two realms. The writer, however, instanced 
Eusabia Palladino's phenomena as something 



86 They Who Understand 

so remote from any spirituality of life, any true 
religious feeling, as to discredit the growing 
interest. Now, as a matter of fact, nothing is 
less connected with the persistence of loves and 
friendships and spiritual intercourse between 
those who have passed on and those here than the 
crude material phenomena of which the Nea- 
politan peasant woman was a striking purveyor. 
If it had its own interest in suggesting unex- 
plained forces of nature or laws not yet grasped, 
that alone might give it claim to scientific in- 
vestigation. 

A still more interesting and remarkable phase 
of unquestioned physical phenomena is that so 
ably studied and described by Doctor Craw- 
ford in the Irish family, where every opportunity 
was gladly afforded him to investigate strange 
occurrences. For instance, when a large table 
was raised in the air by some invisible means, 
Doctor Crawford found that if he passed between 
the medium (a young girl) and the table when it 
was suspended in the air, it immediately fell. 
He set himself to work to penetrate the reason 
for this. His investigations led him to con- 



Evidential Communication and Proof 87 

elude that some power, like that of a rod, pro- 
jected itself from the body of the medium and 
raised the table; and that his passing between 
the girl and the table broke this current of power. 
Doctor Crawford's study of this case was car- 
ried on with scientific appliances, scales, mirrors, 
and phonographs to record and establish the 
reality of sounds or raps ; and he, as a scientific 
engineer, brought to his task trained knowledge 
in an exceptional manner. Now, however curi- 
ous are these phenomena, they are no more spirit- 
uality, they are no more religious growth and 
culture, than are the experiments in a chemical 
laboratory. Persons who should mistake these 
for religious spiritualism would go very far 
astray. With Eusabia Palladino, when the 
exhibition of her powers was given in this coun- 
try, Doctor Hyslop refused to have anything to 
do. Not being a physicist, he was not a specialist 
in investigating physical phenomena, and even 
admitting its genuineness, partially or wholly, 
as may be, it had too little significance for him 
to command his time or interest. We need to 
discriminate between a possible communion of 



88 They Who Understand 

spirit to spirit, in all the beauty of love, all the 
sacredness of religious feeling, all the recognition 
of the communion as natural to the continuity 
of life and as simply the continuation of that 
spiritual intercourse between the seen and the 
unseen that pervades all the Scriptures, — we need 
to discriminate between this and mere physical 
phenomena, however strange that may be as 
estimated from known physical laws. 

Let one take some such communication, for 
instance, as that received through automatic 
writing by Mrs. Fanny H. Park, of Liverpool, 
who (under her maiden name of "F. Heslop") 
has published, in a book entitled "Speaking 
Across the Border-Line", many of these beauti- 
ful and most interesting messages received from 
her husband. A little word about him contrib- 
utes to the better understanding of the mes- 
sages. John Park was a Scotsman, filled with 
the love of life, a keen sportsman, a lover of na- 
ture who "revelled in the beauty of river and 
loch", and whose bias of mind, Mrs. Park tells 
us, "was toward the practical rather than the 
poetical, while for mysticism and all occult 



Evidential Communication and Proof 89 

matters he had no toleration." Mr. Park was 
a man of strong affections and tenacious friend- 
ships; many of his friends said to Mrs. Park 
after his passing that he "was the most lovable 
man" they had ever known. His wife says of 
him that his character "was a combination of 
strength and tenderness, strong in rectitude and 
every manly virtue, but tender and understand- 
ing toward the weakness of others." Mrs. 
Park adds : 

"We never spoke of his approaching death, 
and the thought of his return from the spirit 
world and the possibility of communion with 
him never entered our minds. To us, death 
meant separation, and separation meant death. 
So when he left me, I seemed in my loneliness 
and desolation to have passed also into the land 
of shadows." 

As a matter of fact, also, Mr. Park had been 
intolerant of the idea of spirit communion. 
Neither he nor his wife felt any sympathy with 
the theory. But after his death, through the 
hand of another person, these messages to his 
wife began to be given through the medium of 



90 _ They Who Understand 

automatic writing; they established his identity 
so unmistakably that she had no choice but to 
accept them. This was rather perplexing to 
many of their friends; and he, apparently hear- 
ing a discussion that took place, thus referred to 
it to Mrs. Park : 

"Our friend is quite right in thinking that 
when on earth I opposed all suggestion of spirit 
communion. I thought there was blasphemy 
in the very idea. My whole early training had 
bent my mind in the wrong direction. Now, 
with my fuller vision, and stripped of all the 
theological misconceptions of my youth, I see 
how utterly wrong I was. And to me, one of 
the most wonderful discoveries of this life here 
is that it is possible to return to full communica- 
tion with you, my beloved, and continue in 
almost perfect and unbroken joy the union con- 
summated twenty years ago." 

Later, he began to use his wife's hand for these 
communications. Mrs. Park notes that she was 
filled with dread lest these were the product of 
her own subconscious mind. Perceiving this, 
he wrote : 



Evidential Communication and Proof 91 

"I see you have been going through a needless 
distress of mind as to the authorship of these 
letters. After much reading of modern litera- 
ture on the subject you have flown to the con- 
clusion that possibly your subconscious mind 
was impersonating me, and that these letters 
were not from me at all. My dear, how could 
you think such a foolish thing? Have I not 
given you test after test of my identity? Have 
you not received information beyond your wildest 
dreams? Surely, you know by this time that 
it is I who write to you, my love that surrounds 
you. Never let this doubt stay with you for 
a moment again. Cast it out of your mind and 
cling to the definite assurance which I now give 
you that I am constantly with you, whether 
you realize it or not, inspiring your mind, smooth- 
ing your path, warding off all evil influences, and 
loving you all the time with a love beyond any- 
thing you can dimly imagine." 

Mrs. Park had no thought or intention of pub- 
lishing these messages, feeling they were a sacred 
part of her private life, but she was constrained 
to do so for the same reason that Sir Oliver Lodge 



92 They Who Understand 

felt constrained to give the widest publicity to 
the messages received, or which he believed that 
he received, from his son, Raymond. In giving 
these in full, with a certain admixture that was 
sure to be misunderstood by a large number of 
readers, Sir Oliver did violence to his own feel- 
ings, but he felt he had no right to withhold any 
contribution that could throw light on an im- 
portant subject. Mr. Park, with the wider 
vision of the life beyond, urged the publication 
of his letters. He saw in them something that 
he believed might comfort the sorrowing. When 
Mrs. Park decided to do so he wrote : 

"Now I am glad to see you are arranging the 
letters I have written you from time to time. 
They will be especially valuable to the bereaved. 
... I am glad you are willing to have them 
circulated, for it is just what I tell you in these 
letters that needs to be known. How love 
grows and deepens on this side; how it can be 
communicated to those who are in affinity with 
one another (when one is still on the earth plane) 
and that is the special work of ministering spirits." 

In one of the first of these letters Mr. Park 



Evidential Communication and Proof 93 

describes his passing to the spirit life. The 
matter is made so clear and seems to bear such 
testimony to the naturalness of the transition 
that, at the risk of unduly quoting, I shall ven- 
ture to transcribe it. 

Mr. Park wrote : 

"When I died I simply fell into a state of un- 
consciousness and was at once taken into my 
mother's loving care. . . . Gradually the won- 
ders and beauty of this new world unfolded them- 
selves. The loveliness of the trees and flowers, 
the grandeur of the mountains, the glint of dis- 
tant lakes seemed familiar, yet all spiritualized. 
It was some time before I could realize what 
had happened, and that death had really passed ; 
so I rejoiced, for my suffering on earth had been 
great. Then spiritual illumination came to me, 
I developed new powers, and was literally born 
again. They carried me to my beautiful home, 
and every flower I loved was there to greet me. 
Oh, such roses ! Would that you could see them 
too. . . . How can I tell you of this new and 
beautiful life? ... I see now that only the 
germ of truth is taught on earth, overladen with 



94 They Who Understand 

much error. You hardly realize that you have 
the power to express God in your lives. . . . 
Remember, you are building your home here all 
the time you dwell on earth. It is the outer 
expression of your thought. All spiritual and 
beautiful thought produces beautiful surround- 
ings. ... I am busy perfecting our home, but 
it cannot be completed until you join me. . . . 
You are never alone . . . but no spirit, however 
pure and beautiful, must ever come between 
your soul and God. Because you have given 
yourself into the divine keeping nothing of any 
kind can harm you. Banish every vestige of 
fear from your mind. You are in God's care, 
and your guides will help to keep evil influences 
away." 

These last lines are especially suggestive, as 
many persons make an objection to any idea of 
communication with the unseen, or to the idea 
of receptivity to influence from those beyond, 
by saying that they feel all influence should 
come to us directly from God. In that they 
are quite right, only is it not always possible, 
even in this world, to love God more the more we 



Evidential Communication and Proof 95 

love our friends, our associates, or the more sym- 
pathy and active good will we feel and manifest 
to every one ? 

" loved the most, when most I feel 
There is a lower and a higher;" 

And again : 

" The love that rose on stronger wings, 
Unpalsied when he met with Death 
Is comrade of the lesser faith 
That sees the course of human things." 

That is, the more entirely the soul goes forth 
to the divine; the more one "loves God", to 
use a common and ever comprehensive expres- 
sion, the more truly does he love his friends ; and 
the converse is also true. We do not make the 
objection, in this present life, that we cannot, 
or should not, love our friends because we love 
God. On the contrary, the more deeply any 
nature is attuned with the divine, the larger is 
the capacity for associations and friendships. 
"My friends come to me unsought", said Emer- 
son ; "the great God Himself gave them to me." 
Why should the love of God and the love of friends 



96 They Who Understand 

be in any mutual exclusiveness of each other 
when the friends have passed into the next 
phase of life? The divine aid is not less if it 
come through the means of a friend, in the seen 
or in the unseen. 

An instance of communication from the be- 
yond that is one of the most simple and natural 
as well as impressive, one which has never before 
been made public, but which I have permission 
to use here, — is related by Mrs. Bradley, then 
living in Michigan. The story would lose if 
its narrative were changed from the simple form 
in which she herself relates it, and which is thus 
given in her own words: 

"My name is Nellie L. Bradley, and I have 
lived for twenty-eight years in Muskegon (Michi- 
gan), my present home. My husband and I 
have been devoted lovers for forty-five years, 
and I am just a cheerful, plain, sunny-tempered 
woman, never, at any time in my life, a profes- 
sional medium, or anything of that sort. Never- 
theless, I have had some remarkable experi- 
ences in that line, one of the strangest of which 
I will now relate. 



Evidential Communication and Proof 97 

"On the first day of the February of 1907 I 
was sitting by the window sewing, when the voice 
of my dead sister said : ' Nellie, you must go 
away, or you will not live many months.' My 
sister was Mrs. Villa St owe, who had lived in 
Grand Rapids. I had always called her 'Dar- 
ling ', for she was my idol, and the bond between 
us was very close. She had died in the August 
of 1906. I had been suffering for some time with 
rheumatism and was perhaps illy able to endure 
the chill and dampness of the spring. When 
my husband came in I told him of what my 
sister had said, and that she had added that the 
way would be opened. From that moment I 
began preparing for a journey, although circum- 
stances made it seem extremely difficult, if not 
impossible for us to leave." 

Mrs. Bradley here explained how the un- 
dreamed-of arrival of a friend from Duluth 
combined with other circumstances to enable 
them to leave at once, and she thus continues : 

"Mr. Bradley had bought tickets for Havana, 
although he did not know why he chose that city, 
as we had only intended going to Florida. We 



98 They Who Understand 

stopped in Florida, and only then did my hus- 
band tell me that he had extended our journey 
to Cuba. Arriving at Havana we went to the 
Hotel Tuileries, and a little later we recalled that 
a young man from our city, Earl Patton of 
the United States Army, was stationed in that 
locality, and we went to see him. On returning 
we found we had taken the wrong car, and look- 
ing about to find some one who spoke our lan- 
guage, we noticed a lady in deepest mourning, 
accompanied by a gentleman, sitting near us. 
I turned and said to them, smiling, 'Pardon me, 
but do you speak English?' He replied in the 
affirmative and added, ' What can I do for you ? ' 
We made known our mistake; he directed us 
aright and expressed the hope that we were 
pleasantly located, saying that there were de- 
lightful rooms in their hotel overlooking the 
harbor. He wrote the address on a card, and 
we left the car; but on reaching our hotel we 
found them waiting to tell us that the rooms 
of which they had spoken had been taken mean- 
time, but giving us another address equally 
pleasant, to which we removed that evening. 



Evidential Communication and Proof 99 

This casual conversation, with our thanks for 
their courtesy, was all that passed between us. 
Nor did we expect to see them again. 

" Usually I sleep well ; but occasionally there 
is an exception, and I soon realized that night 
that, despite fatigue, I should not sleep. A 
cold wave passed over me and a voice said, 
' This is Marie ; they called me Sweet Marie from 
the old song.' I strained my eyes, startled, and 
although the street light was shining dimly 
through the shutters, I could see nothing. Nev- 
ertheless I felt this sentient presence, and I 
said : ' I don't know you ; what do you want 
of me?' 

" ' Oh ! ' the plaintive young voice answered, 
'I want you to take a message to my mother. 
I have tried, oh so long, and you are the first 
one I could talk to.' I protested, 'But I don't 
know your mother, ' and she said : ' Oh ! yes, 
you do. Please tell her I cannot be happy 
while she grieves so deeply; it holds me to the 
earth/ v 

" Now this was not a dream. I was never more 
completely awake and in full consciousness. I 



100 They Who Understand 

asked Marie questions about herself, all of which 
she answered, telling me that she died four years 
ago, at the age of twenty-three. Finally I begged 
her to leave me that I might sleep ; and at part- 
ing she said : ' My father will take you by the 
hand and say that you have given him more 
comfort than any one else/ In the morning 
I told my husband of the experience, and he 
remarked that it would be strange if we met 
these people again and that he should be glad 
to have an opportunity of asking them if they 
had such a daughter. But so far as we knew 
the incident was closed, and we were so engaged 
with our sightseeing that we almost forgot the 
matter." 

A few nights later, Mrs. Bradley said, her 
husband proposed that they should go to dine 
at "Harvey's", and as he spoke a cold wave 
passed over her. Before she could reply a voice 
spoke to her inner ear saying, "No, no, please 
go to the Chinese restaurant; there you will 
meet my father and mother and dine with them." 
Mrs. Bradley was so startled she could hardly 
relate this to her husband; and he at once re- 



Evidential Communication and Proof 101 

plied : " Yes, let's see it out ; it would be strange, 
indeed, if these people were there." 
Mrs. Bradley thus resumes the story : 
"We started down under the avenue of date 
palms, in the moonlight, on our way to the 
Chinese restaurant, and all the way Marie's voice 
kept sounding beside me. We found it crowded, 
but seeing two vacant seats at some distance we 
proceeded toward them, when my husband sud- 
denly grasped my arm and said, in a low tone : 
'If there are not those people we met in the car.' 
A sudden wave of excitement and awe swept 
over me as the voice of the dead girl again spoke 
distinctly at my ear, saying, insistently, 'Ask 
my mother, ask her about Marie.' The lady 
and gentleman rose at our approach, with a 
smile of recognition, and begged us to dine with 
them. In my agitation I at once asked the 
lady if she knew any one by the name of ' Marie ' ? 
She grew deadly pale and dropping her knife, 
exclaimed, 'Why do you ask? How did you 
hear that name? Indeed I know; she was my 
darling daughter whom we lost four years ago; 
we called her Sweet Marie, for the old song.' 



102 They Who Understand 

My husband then interposed and begged we 
would say no more until after dinner, inviting 
the gentleman and lady to return with us to our 
apartment that we might tell them the story." 

The details that Marie had told Mrs. Bradley 
proved to be correct in every particular, and her 
parents were deeply affected. On their leave- 
taking, Mrs. Bradley further states that the 
gentleman took her hand and repeated exactly 
the words about the comfort she had given them 
that Marie had before asserted her father would 
say. 

This little incident illustrates the natural 
and simple way in which communication from 
the unseen is interwoven with the ordinary occur- 
rences of daily life. The great error is in regard- 
ing communion and companionship between 
the seen and the unseen as a phenomenal 
occurrence, rather than as a natural and, to a 
great extent, a constant experience in daily life. 
All tendencies to the abnormal are not to be 
considered as inevitably conjoined with psychical 
gifts, but rather as due to their abuse, or their 
absence. The life of the spirit, whether in or 



Evidential Communication and Proof 105 

withdrawn from the physical body, is a normal 
life. So far as it varies from the normal, it is 
simply defective as a spiritual life. The narra- 
tions of the mingled life between the inhabitants 
of the physical and of the ethereal realms per- 
sist through all the ages. Boccaccio, in his life 
of Dante, relates that when the poet died the 
"Divina Commedia" was found unfinished, and 
■the manuscript was sent to Can Grande lacking 
the last thirteen cantos that now appear. The 
poet's sons, Pietro and Jacobo, were anxiously 
questioned about the missing cantos, but they 
knew nothing of them. One night, however, 
Dante appeared to his son, Jacobo, "his face 
shining with light, and when the son asked if he 
were living, replied: 'Yes; but in the true 
life, not yours.' Then it occurred to Jacobo to 
ask his father if he had finished his work before 
he passed to the true life, and if he had, where 
was the conclusion to be found. To which 
question came the answer,^ ' Yes, I completed 
it ' ; and then it seemed his father took Jacobo 
by the hand and led him to the room in which 
he had lived and, touching a panel in the wall, 



104 They Who Understand 

said: 'That which you seek is here'; and hav- 
ing said this, he disappeared." And when the 
sons looked, the next day, there were the miss- 
ing cantos. "And in great joy they copied 
them/' continues Boccaccio, "and sent them to 
Messer Cano, and then added them to the im- 
perfect poem; and in this way the work which 
had been carried on so many years was finished." 
No one can realize the true nature of the present 
life until he also realizes the true nature of the 
change we call death. Those who pass on are not 
asleep. Those who pass on are not removed 
into conditions incomprehensible to those here. 
They enter, so far as they are fitted, on more 
intense activities and a larger range of conscious- 
ness, and thus become more alive than is possible 
in the limitations of the physical world. The 
conviction of immortality and of the eternal 
progress of the spirit requires for its completest 
atmosphere of growth and its manifestation in 
reality the knowledge of the reality of communi- 
cation between those in the seen and the unseen. 
Without this knowledge there may be (and is) 
faith in God and faith in immortality as a condi- 



Evidential Communication and Proof 105 

tion, vague and ungrasped, but some way, some 
time, to be recognized as true; but with this 
knowledge (of the absolute unity of life and the 
unbroken communication) the faith becomes 
clear and intelligible, not vague. , It becomes 
an ever-present reality of the immediate hour, 
sustaining, encouraging, and revealing the practi- 
cal nature of the divine aid in every hour of life. 
It assures us we are not left alone. If the reli- 
gious man, who does not accept the Spirit- 
ualists ' faith in the communication and the 
continued companionship between those who 
have passed on and ourselves — if he asserts 
his belief and full reliance on the help of God; 
if he only looks to Jesus for aid — why, that 
is good ; but that faith is not lessened, nor neces- 
sarily at all changed, by a little knowledge as 
to the ways and means by which the Divine 
Power helps us. "Are they not all ministering 
spirits?" 

Nor do we fully enter into the realities and 
the nobler possibilities of the present life until 
we realize that we are, even now and here, 
inhabitants of both realms. In every achieve- 



100 They Who Understand 

ment of life we draw upon ethereal forces. The 
ethereal realm interwoven with our own is not 
a miracle region; it is another phase of nature. 
In fact, life here could not exist at all unless it 
drew upon the life beyond. There is a perpetual 
inflowing of ethereal energy, and if this were 
checked, that which we know as the physical 
world would cease to exist. The ethereal world 
is far more real than is the physical. Stephen 
Phillips embodies an absolute fact in the lines : 

" I tell you, we are fooled by the eye and the ear ; 
These organs muffle us from the real world 
That lies about us." 

The more clearly the vision extends into the 
more real world the more power is unlocked to 
draw upon for achievements. Then does one 
ally himself with the diviner forces. Then does 
he learn how to transmute his energy into power. 
For energy is not synonymous with power. En- 
ergy may be restless and dissipate itself to little 
purpose. Power is calm, serene, uninterrupted, 
unremitting, and perfects itself in definite achieve- 
ments. All problems of life are really spiritual 



Evidential Communication and Proof 107 

problems. There is no line of demarcation. In 
the last analysis Love is the only working philos- 
ophy of life. Love is light and beauty and 
power. Love alone, in the larger and higher 
sense, makes endeavor successful. "Love feels 
no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, pleads 
no excuse of impossibility. He that loveth 
flieth and rejoiceth." He that loveth dwells 
in that harmonious atmosphere in which there 
is no waste of energy. The initial condition for 
any form of worthy achievement is to banish 
every discordant thought and establish that 
harmony which rests alone on the basis of uni- 
versal love and good will. It is when living in 
this diviner air that communication with those 
in the unseen becomes easy and a frequent part 
of the natural experience of every day. 

"Let nothing disturb thee, 
Nothing affright thee ; 
All things are passing ; 
God never changeth , 
Patient endurance 
Attaineth to all things ; 



108 They Who Understand 

Whom God possesseth 
In nothing is wanting, — 
Alone God suffice th." 

; Nor is the "possession" of God a mere phrase 
of abstract and incomprehensible significance. 
It is the practical duty of life, and it is the most 
practicable of duties. We possess God when 
His divine spirit possesses and informs and 
dominates our own. Life is a spiritual drama, 
and every day's experience may be invested with 
a kind of magical enchantment. The enlarge- 
ment of interests by the extension of thought 
and vision into the unseen; by the conscious- 
ness of the constant telepathic communion that 
may be held with friends there, is the very re- 
demption of life from the commonplace and the 
trivial to the plane of the significant and the 
universal. 



IV 



THE NATURALNESS OF THE NEXT PHASE OF 

LIFE 

"The soul looketh steadily forward, creating a 
world before her, leaving a world behind her, and the 
web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed." 

— Emerson. 
"This world is not conclusion, 
A sequel lies beyond." 

— Emily Dickinson. 

THE absolute naturalness claimed for the next 
phase of human life is, by a paradox, its 
most bewildering attribute. The language 
of the Bible has been taken literally to an over- 
whelming extent, where it is intended to be only 
symbolic and figurative. The literal interpreta- 
tion of this language has been handed down 
through so many ages, it has been so universally 
taught, that it is little wonder the world is so 
generally disposed to accept these ideas. It is 
not strange that with the symbolic picturing of a 
state of rest, the suggestion of activities should 

109 



110 They Who Understand 

seem a desecration. Or if the conviction has been 
inculcated that sleep, poetically invested, is the 
condition after this phase of life, to endure until 
some mystical and incomprehensible resurrection 
takes place ; or that a more or less literal accept- 
ance of golden streets, palm branches, and harps 
possesses the mind, — these ideas, too, being en- 
twined with tender and sacred associations, — 
it is little wonder that a different philosophy, one 
involving no break in the continuity of activities, 
might be regarded as lacking in religious rever- 
ence. 

Yet a deeper study of the teaching of Jesus will 
disclose new points of view. Were the more 
modern conception of spiritual life based on mere 
phenomena alone, with little heed of the religious 
feelings, it would naturally repel persons of the 
higher order. Unless this somewhat different 
conception of death can be spiritualized and made 
a vital part of our religious faith, not held as 
antagonistic to it, the conception will not meet 
with any universal recognition nor win any uni- 
versal belief. 

But is it not true that religion is, in its very 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 111 

nature, progressive ? Or rather, perhaps, that as 
man progresses it reveals its truth to him more 
and more completely? "I have many things to 
tell you, but you cannot bear them now," we 
find Jesus saying. In the enlarging conceptions 
of scientific truth that record themselves, succes- 
sively, through the ages, generation after genera- 
tion, we see how the views of nature change; 
how the attitude and belief of one century, or one 
generation, is discarded, or greatly changed, by 
the next. May this not be equally true in regard 
to the great problem of the origin, the development, 
the destiny of man ? I do not phrase this, " the 
destiny of the soul ", as if the soul were something 
apart from the man himself. That phrasing is 
misleading. It belongs to the past, when the 
conception of man was that of the visible form 
which possessed, we felt sure, a soul ; but of what 
mysterious nature could not be conjectured. 
Now we realize the transient aspect of the visible 
man; we realize that his physical body is no 
more himself than his clothing is himself; that 
the real man is simply manifesting himself by 
means of his physical body as the mechanism, 



112 They Who Understand 

the instrument, of his contact with the physical 
world. 

What is his destiny as an immortal being? 
We follow him through the physical environ- 
ment; what next succeeds that? Can we still 
follow him after he has withdrawn from the 
physical world? Can we penetrate into the 
ethereal realm of "the encircling spirit world"? 
Through all ages this spirit world has been felt; 
the intimations of immortality are always in the 
air. Modern spiritualism focused and verified 
many of these intimations ; the purely scientific 
work of psychical research has contributed valu- 
able aid ; but now intuition and increasing spirit- 
uality of life are bringing to bear a force of con- 
viction and a larger grasp of knowledge than has 
before been revealed. Science and spirituality 
go hand in hand to this end. Science has re- 
vealed and formulated the existence of the 
ethereal world; spirituality recognizes that this 
ethereal world, in correspondence with the 
ethereal body in which man is clothed after dis- 
carding the physical, is the natural environ- 
ment for the next phase of this evolutionary prog- 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 113 

ress we call life. The existence of the etheric 
body is now a recognized fact which is no more 
denied than is the existence of the physical body. 
After this etheric body shall have served its use, 
during the sojourn in the ethereal world, it will 
be succeeded by a body still finer and more subtle. 
But of these future conditions we can now only 
speculate; while with the one immediate future 
condition we can already formulate much accurate 
and positive knowledge. 

Here are two realms, the physical and the 
ethereal, that interpenetrate each other; the in- 
habitants of the former withdraw from it and pass 
into the latter. The transition effects no imme- 
diate change. Nor is the new environment in 
any respect so different from the former as to 
amaze the newcomer. The greatest surprise, 
indeed, is in the realization that the change is so 
much less than has been anticipated. There is 
a vast amount of evidence already that sub- 
stantiates this statement. To the question as to 
how one can know that this is reliable evidence 
it may be answered that the identity of individ- 
uals on the other side has been so unmistakablv 



114 They Who Understand 

established as to give reasonable warrant for its 
acceptance as a fact. Now when the identity- 
is accepted ; when the friend making these state- 
ments is one on whose truth and judgment reli- 
ance could always be placed; and when the 
descriptive accounts of the conditions of life in 
the ethereal agree with much positive knowledge 
gained through actual demonstration in labora- 
tory research, the assertions and statements made 
commend themselves to the mind. 

Take the case of a communication from Edward 
Everett Hale. When Doctor Hale returned to 
his Boston home from a visit in Europe would his 
friends have doubted any narration of his about 
life, or other matters, in London or Paris ? Then 
why, if his identity as a communicator is estab- 
lished beyond reasonable doubt, should one 
doubt any statement of his regarding his present 
environment? I may have related in some 
previous book the little incident that I beg to 
record here, but if so, it is easy for the reader 
already familiar with it to turn this page. It 
is so typical an illustration of the perfect natural- 
ness of the next environment into which we enter 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 115 

that I venture the risk of repetition. Soon after 
the death of Kate Field, Doctor Hale wrote to me 
in Paris, saying, "I did not know Miss Field; 
I hope I shall know her." This was in the 
summer of 1896 ; the years went on, and he also 
passed into the ethereal. Doctor Hyslop (who 
had not known Doctor Hale) was pursuing his 
investigations in psychical research through the 
remarkable mediumship of Minnie M. Soule, the 
famous Boston psychic, and coming to me one day, 
some few years after Doctor Hale's death, told 
me that Doctor Hale had apparently been at the 
seance that morning and had sent a message to 
me, although a message that Doctor Hyslop 
found quite incomprehensible. It was, "Tell 
Lilian Whiting I have met Kate Field, and that 
she is the most adventurous spirit I have ever 
seen in a feminine body." But link the message 
with the letter of years before and how unmis- 
takable is the connection, the message being a 
natural sequence to the letter. In the letter he 
mentioned that he had not known Miss Field. 
When he himself passes on into the same 
environment he not unnaturally meets her. 



116 They Who Understand 

When in this life Miss Field was one of his most 
appreciative readers and admirers. His convic- 
tions on any matter impressed and influenced 
her. What more natural than their meeting in 
the new conditions to which both have passed? 
And Doctor Hale's characterization of her as an 
"adventurous spirit* ' is one unusually applicable. 
The message given somewhere about 1912 is in 
perfect sequence to the letter in 1896. 

Lady Henry Somerset has related that an audi- 
ble voice out of the unseen spoke to her, directing 
her to go forward in the temperance movement. 
At that time she was entirely engaged in the social 
life that presses upon an English peeress, and 
while she had felt promptings and drawing toward 
work of reforms, involving leadership and its 
sacrifices, these promptings had only dimly 
stirred in her mind. When the voice spoke her 
resolution was taken, with the important and 
beneficent results to the world with which the 
public is familiar. Nobly did Lady Henry respond 
to the bidding. She answered the call, and the 
path on which she then entered has been one of 
strange contrast to that life of ease and luxury 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 117 

which otherwise would have been her appointed 
way. 

In the very interesting reminiscences 1 of Mrs. 
Julia Ward Howe given by two of her daughters, 
there is the account of an experience which she 
spoke of as "a midnight vision." Mrs. Howe 
was suddenly awakened by some words falling 
on her mind, as if from a voice, and in her journal 
she thus recorded the incident : 

. . . "There seemed to be a new, a wondrous, 
ever-permeating light, the glory of which I cannot 
attempt to put into human words, — the light 
of the new-born hope and sympathy — blazing. 
The source of this light was born of human en- 
deavor. . . . And then I saw the victory. All 
of evil was gone from the earth. Misery was 
blotted out. Mankind was emancipated and 
ready to march forward in a new era of human 
understanding, of all-encompassing sympathy, 
and ever-present help, the era of perfect love, of 
peace passing understanding/ ' 

This was in the year 1908 ; and does it not seem 

1 Julia Ward Howe : 1819-1910. Boston. Houghton 
Mifflin Company, 1916. 



118 They Who Understand 

to have been an intimation of the sublime ideal 
toward which humanity is tending, and of the 
newness of life for which conditions are being 
shaped and molded by the recent conflict? 
Mrs. Howe had never been drawn to any special 
study of psychical literature or speculative 
theories. But the eyes that saw the glory of the 
coming of the Lord were the eyes of vision, and 
without any especial formulating of specific con- 
viction, her daily life was simply the life of the 
spirit. 

Of Mrs. Browning it was said that she spoke 
not particularly of religion; her whole life was 
religion; and similarly it might be said of so 
exalted a spirit as that of Mrs. Howe, that her 
entire life, philosophic, poetic, mystic, was the 
life of perpetual companionship with celestial 
intelligences. 

Mrs. Livermore had given much thought to the 
writings of Sir Oliver Lodge, Frederic Myers, and 
others eminent in presenting the philosophy cf 
spirituality, and she had come to the definite con- 
viction of the reality of communication between 
the two realms. Two letters from her, each nar- 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 110 

rating a striking psychical experience, have al- 
ready been published in two previous books of 
my own ("The Spiritual Significance", 1900; 
"The Adventure Beautiful ", 1917), and in many 
other of her letters to me allusion and assertion 
and speculative thought regarding the matter 
were almost invariably expressed. After her own 
passing she described, through the hand of a 
psychic, her joyful entrance to the ethereal, say- 
ing in part : " They were all here to meet me ; my 
dear husband, Lucy Stone, Wendell Phillips, and so 
many of my friends." What more natural ? The 
language used in relating this included many 
turns of expression characteristic of her, and 
one or two incidents that corresponded with 
some objective occurrences, thus establishing a 
strong presumption of the evidential character 
of the message. 

The etheric double of the individual has its 
prototype in nature. Every tree, every object 
manufactured by man, every aspect of nature, 
has both its material and its ethereal side. Of 
flowers, we on earth take the material flower; 
those in the next environment take the ethereal 



120 They Who Understand 

part of the same flower. The material and the 
ethereal are conjoined like shadow and substance. 
And, like these, the material corresponds to the 
shadow ; the ethereal to the substance. It is the 
ethereal which is the positive, the significant, the 
substantial ; it is the material which is the tran- 
sient and of lesser significance. It is the ethereal 
body which Saint Paul asserts to be the "sub- 
stantial" body. 

An entire fallacy has been presented and per- 
petuated under variously erroneous forms. The 
phase of life succeeding this has been identified 
with the shadowy, the wraithlike; it has been 
relegated to a region of phantoms and phantasms ; 
it has been regarded as unknown and, so far as 
human intelligence could go in the present, as 
unknowable. Even in the assertion of many of 
the professional psychical "researchers", the 
next condition of human life has been presented 
as something so mysterious that only the scientist 
should make any attempt to explore it. They 
would seem to regard it as some abstruse prob- 
lem in physics or some dangerous experiment in 
chemistry might be regarded, — as impossible of 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 121 

approach save by the expert. Practically, the 
attitude of many of them affirms that the general 
public should provide the funds for carrying on a 
purely scientific work, whose processes it must 
not expect to be instructed in, or even hope to 
understand; and must quietly await results as 
to whether these experts discover that there is, 
or is not, personal immortality! As well might 
the church universal affirm that religion is no 
affair of the layman ; that it consists in mysterious 
rites known only to the priesthood and exclusively 
to be directed and carried on by them. The great 
fallacy has been in relegating the experience 
entered upon by humanity after the change called 
death to the region of phenomena. Spiritualism 
has also largely contributed to this false attitude, 
although it has contributed so much of truth 
and illumination that it savors of ingratitude to 
arraign the movement for its errors. All the 
same, in the pursuit of truth one knows neither 
friend nor foe ; and there could hardly be found 
any ethical cult that has not its errors and its 
abuses. Cults are composed of people, and the 
human race is not yet infallible ; not yet perf ect, 



122 They Who Understand 

but simply on its great way toward the goal 
of ultimate perfection. 

The general recognition of the exceptional 
persons known as psychics, or mediums, has 
created a widespread (but wholly erroneous) 
conviction that these persons were the gate 
keepers, so to speak, and that no communication 
with those in the unseen was possible save through 
their agency. Now it is true that there are these 
exceptional individualities who have the natural 
gift, in varying degree, of communicating with 
those who have passed into the ethereal world. 
Just what qualities or faculties determine this 
special power is not definitely known. They 
apparently have a greater preponderance of the 
luminiferous ether than is common, but then 
what is luminiferous ether ? Many psychics hold 
their vocation reverently. Many hold it com- 
mercially only, and, as we all know, some are 
entirely sincere and truthful, and some are not. 
Many people draw a strict line of demarcation 
between the professional and the nonprofessional 
medium, declaring that they have no faith in the 
former. Does not this seem unreasonable ? If a 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 123 

medium devotes his (or her) time entirely to this 
calling, why should it not be remunerated as is 
the calling of the ministry? As the world goes, 
it must be. The medium must pay his bills like 
other people ; and if he devotes himself to this 
calling he is entitled to just payment, nor does 
this any more invalidate his spiritual usefulness 
than the salary of a clergyman invalidates his 
usefulness to his parish. As a matter of fact, the 
professional medium is apt to be more unerring 
as a transmitter of messages than is the unpro- 
fessional. For mediumship, like all other voca- 
tions that have to do with either the material 
or the immaterial world, grows stronger by defi- 
nite practice. 

It is precisely the same with the vocation of 
the poet. Mrs. Browning used constantly to urge 
upon her husband, during all the years of their 
married life, — that wonderful idyl of fifteen 
perfect years, — the desirability of going to his 
study immediately after breakfast with the 
definite intention of writing poetry. To her it 
was a calling, a vocation as well as a consecration. 
"I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of 



124 They Who Understand 

poetry," she said; "nor leisure for the hour of 
the poet." Every worker in any line whatsoever, 
in poetry and romance as well as in the less 
inspirational order of literary work ; in spiritual 
seeking and in prayer, as well as in official and 
mechanical and industrial pursuits, knows the 
untold magic of regular hours and a definite 
purpose. "No work that is worth doing," said 
one of the greatest of men, "can be thrust into 
the holes and corners of life." Mr. Browning 
was not, however, temperamentally amenable to 
Mrs. Browning's suggestions. He was variously 
gifted, and during all his earlier life music and 
sculpture attracted him almost as strongly as 
poetry. The artist suffers when he is the victim 
of over-possession. His efforts in any one 
direction are neutralized, if not paralyzed, by 
counter-attractions. A body placed at the center 
of the earth would be equally attracted in all 
directions and would therefore remain motionless. 
The too numerous attractions are equally dis- 
astrous to specific achievement. Whether, after 
Mrs. Browning's withdrawal from the visible 
world, she was able to influence her husband more 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 125 

potently must remain an unanswered question; 
but, at all events, it was after she had vanished 
that he entered upon regular morning hours for 
work, and that he produced his greatest poem, 
"The Ring and the Book." It was in the 
spring of 1860, more than a year before her death, 
that he had chanced upon "the old yellow book", 
when strolling through the piazza of San Lorenzo, 
on a market day; but it was four years later 
before he had transmuted the tragedy of the 
Franceschini into his immortal work. 

The professional psychic who brings to the 
vocation the added potency of attention focused, 
as it were, at regular hours, is apt to be more 
unerring as a transmitter than one who only 
exercises the gift at irregular intervals. But 
surveying the entire field of mediumship from 
this present vantage point of time, one could 
hardly escape the conclusion that mediumship 
has been a phase, a temporary bridge, a lamp 
in the darkness ; but that now the time has come, 
or is rapidly approaching, when it is no longer 
needed. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory, 
as a rule, than the seance. It has served a great 



126 They Who Understand 

purpose; but its best use was to lead to its 
disuse. It has served to establish the indisputable 
fact that communication between the two states 
of life is possible ; the complaint that it has never 
given any communication of value is unfounded ; 
it has given, first and last, during the seventy 
years of modern spiritualism, a proportion of 
communications of significance ; and it has given 
a very great number of communications that 
have established the identity of the communicator, 
although nothing of much importance was said. 
The establishment of the truth that communi- 
cation is possible is the all-important purpose it 
has served. After that, the messages, however 
interesting or comforting, are yet negligible 
compared with the fact that messages are possible 
at all. 

Now that the purpose is served, — then what ? 
The next step is for each to so develop his own 
spiritual faculties that he may be in telepathic 
response to his friends in the ethereal realm. 
The higher being, the spiritual self, the real self 
in every person can be awakened. But this 
awakening can only be accomplished by the 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 127 

individual for himself. He must generate the 
force that will unlock currents of energy hitherto 
unsuspected. He must generate the force that 
will set free a higher range of faculties. It is 
the liberation of this force that is known in 
religious experiences as conversion. It is a very 
real fact of life. It may easily be the supreme 
fact and the transcendent experience of life, an 
epoch, that ushers one into a new world. It was 
an experience of this order that Edward Everett 
Hale thus describes : 

"I began by seeking during the day one hour 
of perfect solitude. As the weeks went by, I 
began to be conscious of a curious change in 
myself which I did not and do not explain. My 
pleasure in the many interests that made up my 
life began to diminish and become dull. Instead 
of desiring to finish the duties to turn to the 
pleasures, I found that the so-called pleasures 
had little interest. Various things that had 
filled my mind lost attraction. I felt no lack in 
life, however. I believe I was conscious of a 
greater interest." 

The poets have always testified to the reality 



128 They Who Understand 

of the spiritual realm that encircles humanity. 
This testimony has not impressed the general 
reader with its true significance. It has been 
relegated to the atmosphere of imaginative 
romance. Yet to the poet (the very perception 
and experience, indeed, that determines him as a 
poet), the reality of the interblending worlds is 
invariably recognized. No writer of verse who 
has not this recognition and conviction has poetic 
immortality. His songs may have a season of 
aesthetic recognition, but they hold no enduring 
spell over the minds of men. All poets who have 
won universal recognition are poets who intui- 
tively and inevitably affirm in their work the 
reality of the spiritual life. One does not need 
to offer in evidence any list of names to support 
this assertion. No poet has expressed his percep- 
tion of the ethereal realm as interpenetrated with 
our own more clearly than has Lowell in the lines : 

"We see but half the causes of our deeds 
Seeking them wholly in the outer life, 
And heedless of the encircling spirit world 
Which, though unseen, is felt, and sows in us 
All germs of pure and world-wide purposes," 



The Naturalness of the Next PJiase of Life 129 

Although in previous writings I have (perhaps 
more than once) quoted these lines, they are 
instanced here as more perfectly embodying the 
ideal of the twofold life possible to each and all 
than almost any other passage from any poet. 
It is in this expression that one may find the 
true meaning of the term "spiritualism." It is 
not in phenomena, not in tables rising in the 
air, not in raps, nor in bells rung in the air, nor 
lights seen that proceed from no normal source, — 
it is in none of these things that the faith is to be 
sought. There is a world of legerdemain, of 
necromancy; there is also a world of physical 
phenomena, of which such intelligent experiments 
and investigations as those of Doctor Crawford 
offer legitimate interest; but it is not in these 
phenomena that spiritual aid will be found. 
Spiritual things must be spiritually discerned. 
The fact that forces in the ethereal world can 
(and do) transcend physical laws and thus 
reveal the existence of a higher range of laws in 
physics than those we yet know, — this fact has 
no more to do with spirituality of life and with 
communion with friends in the unseen than has 



130 They Who Understand 

any chemical experiment that might be made, 
however interesting in itself. 

It is the quality of the communion enjoyed 
that is important. It is an interesting scientific 
fact that a man in New York may speak to another 
in San Francisco ; but this speaking is not to be 
mistaken for the leisurely conversation with its 
mutual thought and sympathies. The analogy 
holds true in the contrast between the receiving 
of a message through mediumistic aid and the 
prolonged telepathic communion possible to those 
attuned to the same key of vibration. 

Life in the ethereal is in perfectly natural rela- 
tion to the life in the physical world. During 
this past seventy years of modern psychic phenom- 
ena much definite information has been given 
as to the conditions under which life in the ethereal 
moves on. That there is no such contrast to the 
conditions here as has been supposed seems suffi- 
ciently attested by the mass of evidence that 
many who have passed out do not realize the 
transition. 

All nature has two aspects, the material and 
the ethereal, which as strictly correspond as do 



The Naturalness of the Next Phase of Life 131 

an object and its reflection in a mirror. To adjust 
the mind to the realization of this natural condi- 
tion, to speak to those in the unseen as one would 
speak to a friend in the same room, is to enter on 
an order of communication that is full of solace 
and joy. Where is this ethereal world? It is 
in your room, your home, your grounds; it is 
in the streets of the city ; it is in the woods and 
the mountains ; it is on the sea ; it is everywhere 
because the ethereal and the physical worlds 
interpenetrate. 



HOW TO DEVELOP SPIRITUAL RECOGNITION 

"My spirit to yours, dear brother; 
I do not sound your name, but I understand you." 

— Walt Whitman. 

" When two clasp hands and part, they go toward the 
future meeting ; 
For the path of life is a circle ; be sure they shall meet 
again." — Elsa Barker. 

IN "Aurora Leigh" Mrs. Browning has 
something to say of the value of keeping 
up open paths between the seen and the 
unseen. The power of any individual life is 
indefinitely multiplied by the aid of clear and 
well-defined views of its relations to the ethereal 
realm and its possible extensions into the unseen. 
These extensions are practically unlimited. Just 
as one may have all the air he can breathe, 
without money and without price, so may he 
draw from the ethereal realm all the potency he 
can appropriate. The only limitation is within 
himself. There is none on the other side. He 

132 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 133 

may draw on these forces for health ; for success- 
ful achievement; for power to help others; for 
knowledge; for spiritual vitality. And he will 
find that the promise, " To him that hath shall be 
given" is particularly fulfilled in this relation. 
As one draws from this infinite reservoir of 
power he learns how to draw more; as he as- 
similates and appropriates these energies, and 
applies them to specific purposes, he learns how 
to assimilate and appropriate still greater po- 
tencies. Saint Paul, enjoining that men "might 
be filled with all the fulness of God", adds 
this impressive statement : 

"Now unto him that is able to do exceeding 
abundantly above all that we ask or think, 
according to the power that worketh in us." 

The last clause indicates the condition of 
receiving abundantly. It is "according to the 
power that worketh in us." And this power is 
faith. Faith creates the condition by means of 
which the divine aid can come. Faith is a 
creative energy. It is a great fallacy to suppose 
that faith is a merely passive mental state in 
which one idly waits for some miracle to happen 



134 They Who Understand 

to him. On the contrary, it is a condition of the 
most intense form of energy. The Catholic 
expression of an act of faith is significant. It is 
an act; it is doing something, when one has 
faith. It is a process of spiritual creation. 
God is able to do, "exceeding abundantly" all 
we ask, if we do our own part. But, as the apostle 
so clearly portrays, this divine aid is according 
to the power that worketh in us. 

Emerson suggests the ideal condition of living 
when he says, "Every touch should thrill." 
One must so order his life, physically as well as 
spiritually, to the end of keeping in sensitive 
response to the vibratory influences of the ethereal 
realm. The philosophy of fasting was to bring 
the physical nature into this more sensitive and 
subtle response. While man inhabits his physical 
body its condition greatly limits, or promotes, 
the power of the higher influences. It may 
almost exclude them from his perception. The 
bodily condition renders the man more or less 
impenetrable or responsive. So it comes to 
this : that if any physical habit or self-indulgence 
tends to more entirely imprison the spiritual 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 135 

self, then it is wrong simply because of that 
effect. 

Phillips Brooks was once asked how certain 
things seeming innocent enough, not to say quite 
negligible, in and of themselves could be wrong? 
The reply of Bishop Brooks was to the effect 
that if things not wrong in themselves yet kept 
us from better things, to that extent, then, we 
must class them as wrong. 

The teachings of Theosophy regarding the 
nature of the physical body and its relation to 
the ethereal body have for their purpose the 
presentation of knowledge and aid to the estab- 
lishment of open channels for the divine energy 
to reinforce and recharge the human energy. 
The physical body is very plastic, and its matter 
can be modified constantly by the force of the 
will. All hygienic science has for its objects 
and results the more complete domination of the 
physical mechanism by the power of the spirit. 
College athletics are not an end in themselves; 
but athletic culture gives to the youth a power of 
control over this physical instrument that is of 
untold use to him. Theosophy contemplates 



136 They Who Understand 

man as a dense body, a vital body, a desire body, 
and, with other intervening states, to at last 
achieve the spiritual body. During the evolu- 
tionary progress of the spirit, the outer bodies, in 
successive relays, become finer and still finer as 
the spirit exercises upon them its increasing con- 
trol. Spiritual potencies are constantly trans- 
muted to dynamic energy. 

The standpoint of the Christian Fathers was 
that while it was hard to fight poverty and hunger, 
yet from the standpoint of the soul's progress 
these were far preferable and far more favorable 
than luxury. It is left for the more advanced 
civilization to realize that comfort and ease may 
be so held as to minister to the higher life; to 
facilitate achievement; and that, as Emerson 
tersely says: "A cushion is good if you do not 
use it to go to sleep." We have learned that 
there is nothing inherently immoral in wealth, 
or in the larger privileges and opportunities that 
it opens; it is the use we make of these oppor- 
tunities and privileges that determine the matter. 
Thought force is the most intensely creative of 
all potencies. Create in thought ; to realize this 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 137 

creation in the outer and objective life, is the 
invariable process. The unmeasured potency of 
prayer, as the means of uniting man with his 
higher self and uniting him with the divine life, 
is a potency that exceeds all definition or human 
comprehension. It is the power that leads 
man on from glory to glory. It is this power that 
develops spiritual recognition. 

Desire, alone, effects nothing. Will, purpose, 
must be brought to bear. To bring the physical 
mechanism into complete harmony with the con- 
trolling thought; to so refine and dominate it 
that it will serve as the most delicate and flexible 
and sensitive instrument to transmute plan and 
purpose, is the object of both hygienic science 
and moral law. When one comes to study the 
various occult sects and cults, the Rosicrucian, 
the Theosophical, and others, one finds the basis 
of each and all, so far as discipline is concerned, 
to be that of making the body serve as the 
perfect instrument of the spirit. That is the use 
for which it is designed, and its temporary nature 
is simply because that when the spiritual man 
withdraws from the physical world he has no 



138 They Who Understand 

further need of the instrument that related him 
to that world. 

The spiritual forces play a far, larger part in 
this unexplored universe in which we find our- 
selves than we recognize. We are, indeed, 
"heedless of the encircling spirit-world' \ and it is 
as we apprehend more clearly its part in daily 
life that we become more efficient. Science has 
revealed to how limited an extent we see the world 
in which we are placed. The telescope and 
field-glass reveal a wider range on the one side; 
the microscope reveals a wider range on the 
other side. Now there is no inherent im- 
probability in the speculative conception that 
those who have died are still dwelling to a greater 
or lesser extent in the same space in which we 
find ourselves. That we do not see them is no 
argument against their possible presence. The 
eye only registers within its own degree of 
vibration. The ethereal body, as we have seen, 
is invisible, that is to say, unregistered by the 
physical eye, because its rate of vibration is 
beyond the range of that registration. But that 
their sight includes us, in part, or at certain times, 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 139 

at least, seems to be established. This would 
account for many warnings of danger ; for many 
suggestions that find their way, by one means or 
another, to those here. Whether this power of 
cognizance is associated with actual presence in 
the sense in which we understand that ; whether 
it is telepathic and may proceed from any point 
in space, is problematic. But the result on this 
side is much that of the close presence as we 
should understand it here. How, then, shall we 
develop our recognition of that cognizance and 
our own ability to respond to it? 

There are possibilities of resource in the ether 
beyond man's comprehension. The ethereal cur- 
rents that make possible wireless telegraphy 
were as much in the atmosphere when Columbus 
discovered America as they were when they were 
discovered by scientists four centuries later. 
Who may venture to predict the nature of future 
discoveries in nature? The spiritual man exists 
independently of his physical body. He is 
capable, even before death, of partial detach- 
ments from it. The spiritual man has faculties 
undreamed of in the present. He possesses a 



140 They Who Understand 

power, latent to a great degree, to attract new 
forces, to alter conditions, to act upon existing 
phases of the outer life. To this end Faith seems 
to be the key. Doubt disperses and dispels and 
destroys power. Faith fosters the power until 
it grows as the mustard seed and becomes a 
creative force. Now this power to act upon events 
and to bring one's self into harmonious recep- 
tivity to the divine currents may be largely 
assisted by friends in the unseen. Thus may 
those in the two conditions bring to bear the 
best energies of both states of life. It is not 
improbable that the youth who have passed 
from the front into the next phase of life are 
still contributing aid beyond that which was 
possible for them to give here. Jamblichus, 
who died about 333 A.D., said, even in that far- 
away time; 

"If the soul rises to the gods she becomes 
godlike, and able to know the above and below; 
she then obtains the power to heal diseases, to 
make useful inventions, to institute wise laws. 
Man's intuition is the result of the connection 
existing between his soul and the Divine Spirit; 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 141 

the stronger this union grows, the greater will be 
his intuition or spiritual knowledge. ... If 
the mind of man is illumined by the Divine Light, 
the ethereal vehicle of his soul becomes filled 
with light and is shining." 

Not only from the early Christian centuries, 
but from periods long antedating the appearance 
of Jesus on earth, similar testimony comes. 
The perception of spiritual truth advances as 
man advances in development. The twentieth 
century should give us a larger view; nor is it 
venturing too much to believe that this larger 
view already manifests itself in the world. The 
magnitude of the War, its unprecedented depths 
of tragedy, are bringing us face to face with 
spiritual realities. Consciousness is extending 
itself to hitherto unexplored regions. Man is 
learning to send his soul through the invisible. 
In proportion to this extension of consciousness 
is man's approach to larger truth. The larger 
view of truth promotes greater effectiveness in 
all the affairs of life. There is no limit to the 
radius to which consciousness can extend itself. 
Spiritual advancement is as recognizable a fact 



142 They Who Understand 

as advancement in electrical science. And as 
consciousness extends itself toward the Infinite 
Consciousness, man grows more capable of co- 
operating with the divine purposes, and it is 
thus, in the language of the Bible, that he may 
"walk with God." Archdeacon Wilberforce 
made the striking assertion that "The human 
soul is a dynamo, generating spiritual electric- 
ity from a magnetic field as vast as the whole 
universe. ,, 

Should we not, then, be able to penetrate with 
intelligence and accuracy to some degree beyond 
the confines of the physical world? May we 
not enter upon cosmic truth? May we not dis- 
cover that the universe of all intellectual and 
spiritual life is one ; that in this universe those 
in the physical body and those who have with- 
drawn from it are all dwelling together? Love 
itself unites closer bonds in this realization. 

" Regret is dead, but love is more 

Than in the summers that are flown, 
For I myself with these have grown 
To something higher than before." 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 143 

— — — » ■ 

Again, we find Tennyson saying : 

" Known and unknown ; human, divine ; 
Sweet human hand and lips and eye ; 
Dear heavenly friend that cannot die, 
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine." 

Spiritual recognition, therefore, is attained by 
rising into the realm of the spiritual order. 
"Why do we make no greater advances?" 
questioned Mrs. Browning regarding communi- 
cation with those beyond. "Why are our com- 
munications chiefly trivial? Why, but because 
we ourselves are trivial. Why, but because we 
do not bring serious souls and concentrated 
attention and holy aspirations to the spirits who 
are waiting for such things? . . . What comes 
from God has life in it, and certainly from the 
growth of all living things, spiritual thought 
cannot be the exception." 

Poet and seer unite with prophet and apostle 
in the conviction that the exaltation of our own 
life is the condition of the recognition of spiritual 
realities. Communication, spirit to spirit, should 
be one of the channels of religious progress. 



144 They Who Understand Vt 

There is a wide contrast between the simple 
truth of spiritual companionship and the mysteries 
of occult phenomena. People have grown be- 
wildered, if not repelled, by the rehearsals of the 
seance. To identify the beauty and naturalness 
of intercommunion with a mass of objective 
phenomena, — with raps, with alleged materiali- 
zations, with the ouija board, with crystal-gazing 
and other forms, — is a confusion that strikes 
dismay to the minds of many. These forms of 
manifestations from the unseen are all genuinely 
used (whatever may be occasional fraud or 
imitation) ; but in the higher and larger aspect 
of spirituality of life they become negligible. 

The danger in all this objective phenomena 
is that of inconsequential communication, as there 
might be were the doors of one's home freely 
opened to any miscellaneous passing crowd. 
While there are not wanting authentic instances 
of communication through a psychic that is of 
both comfort and value, it is still true that the 
better way is to learn to receive the thought, the 
expression, through one's own spiritual faculties. 
Archdeacon Wilberforce, who was left in desola- 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 145 

tion and loneliness by the death of his lovely wife 
although continually conscious of her uplifting 
sympathy and presence, sought a definite com- 
munication through the mediumship of a very 
remarkable woman, Mrs. Etta Wriedt, who had 
gone from her home in Detroit to London at the 
invitation of Mr. Stead. 

The three seances that the Archdeacon had 
with Mrs. Wriedt were very remarkable. He was 
a trained observer, but he was also a man of the 
most delicate and unerring spiritual perception. 
Many sceptics and doubters who believe them- 
selves critical are, instead, dense. They are too 
unawakened to the spiritual side of life to recognize 
truth even when presented. The Archdeacon 
was not a man to be easily deceived, nor, on the 
other hand, one to fail in recognition of any 
genuine communication. Through Mrs. Wriedt's 
powers the audible voice is heard; "and/' said 
the Archdeacon to the writer of this book, "if 
ever I heard my Charlotte's voice, if ever I 
talked with my wife, I did on these occasions/ ' 
Had it been merely the voice alone, however 
unaccounted for save on the theory that Mrs. 



146 They Who Understand 

Wilberforce was speaking, there might be room 
for discussion if not for well-founded doubt; 
but the contents of those conversations included 
matters known only to the husband and wife 
themselves and were of a nature to entirely refute 
any possible theory save that Mrs. Wilberforce 
was speaking. Then, too, the Archdeacon related, 
even quite aside from the subject matter, there 
were turns of expression; allusions; a thousand 
subtle things, incommunicable as " evidential' ' 
matter at the stern and rigorous bar of the Soci- 
ety for Psychical Research, but inevitably the 
strongest and most unmistakable proof of identity 
to the Archdeacon. It would not be right nor 
just, when Mrs. Wriedt, Mrs. Soule, and others 
of a high order, such as Mrs. Piper of Boston, 
whose fame as a transmitter of messages from 
the beyond is world-wide; who is the honored 
friend of Sir Oliver Lodge — it would not be just 
when these exceptional psychics, and others, too, 
that might well be named, are proven so genuine, 
to fail in appreciation of this order of service. 
Yet it may be (and, for one, I believe it is) the 
ideal for each individual to so develop his spiritual 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 147 

faculties that he may be in direct and personal 
touch with the unseen. This achievement is 
already much in evidence, and it will become 
more and more universal. 

Mrs. Livermore (and a saner or more poised 
woman than Mary A. Livermore could hardly 
be known) used to say, after the passing of her 
husband, the Reverend Doctor Daniel Parker 
Livermore, that every morning, after finishing 
her correspondence and meeting other immediate 
demands, she could call her husband and pursue 
an intelligible conversation with him, his part 
in it being instantaneously impressed upon her 
mind as naturally as if it had fallen audibly 
upon her ear. The time is perhaps not very far 
distant when Mrs. Livermore's experience will 
cease to be exceptional. 

No means of developing spiritual recognition, 
aside from prayer, always the most intense power 
in life, can be so helpful as that of taking a certain 
time alone each day to lift up the heart and 
thought and to give one's self to the higher 
currents of the diviner atmosphere. This prac- 
tice sets free the higher powers. 



148 They Who" Understand 

But it is with life, the quality of daily life, 
that we are most concerned. "The field is the 
world." The test is in the average daily contact, 
in work, in social life, in incidental meeting and 
encounter. The test of spirituality of life is in 
the homely virtues of honesty, truth, justice; 
it is in the unconscious influence exerted ; it is in 
the effort to make one's self a link to carry forward 
hope and happiness. The hour of uplift and 
meditation; of opening the mind to all nobler 
calls; the hours even for prayer, are still means 
to an end, not an end in themselves, and that 
end is in diviner living. 

It may be confidently held that 

" . . . Life is ever lord of death, 
And Love can never lose its own." 

Where there is a spiritual bond there can be 
no separation. It is indissoluble for time and 
for eternity. We shall follow those who precede 
us into the ethereal world. What does Emerson 
say ? 

" 'Tis not within the power of fate 
The fate-conjoined to separate." 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 149 

Love is of the immortal life, and over it neither 
time nor change nor death has power. "Love 
is watchful, and, sleeping, slumbereth not. 
Though weary, it is not tired; though pressed, 
it is not straitened ; though alarmed, it is not 
confounded; but as a lively flame and burning 
torch it forces its way upwards and securely 
passes through all. 

"Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of 
trouble, attempts what is above its strength, 
pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks 
all things lawful for itself, and all things possible. 
It is therefore able to undertake all things and 
warrants them to take effect, when he who does 
not love would faint and lie down. 

" He that loveth, flieth, runneth, and rejoiceth ; 
he is free, and cannot be held in. He giveth all 
for all, and hath all in all ; because he resteth in 
One highest above all things, from Whom all 
that is good flows and proceeds. Love is active, 
sincere, affectionate, pleasant, courageous, faith- 
ful, and never seeking itself. 

"If any man love he knoweth what is the cry 
of this voice." 



150 They Who Understand 

Love is an inner and all-pervading and a trans- 
forming energy. It can achieve the impossible. 
It can endure the unendurable. It can create 
life anew from ruins. "Sorrow is a condition of 
time, but joy is the condition of eternity," and 
Love discerns the eternities. The mission of 
Jesus was to bring life and immortality to light ; 
"I am come that ye might have life and have it 
more abundantly;" for life here on earth lived 
divinely is far more abundant than the ordinary 
human life ; and immortality teaches that death 
has no terror, being merely the process of tran- 
sition into the fuller life and joy beyond. The 
life beyond this transition bears the same relation 
to our present life that youth may bear to infancy 
and early childhood ; that mature manhood may 
bear to youth. The evolutionary progress is 
continuous, gradual, unbroken. Who can dis- 
cern any crisis day in the development of the 
infant to the man ? Yet the transition goes on 
before the eye. The normal and orderly devel- 
opment of life includes mutual companionship 
between the two states. All phases of progress 
here imply somewhat of conquest over the ethereal 



How to Develop Spiritual Recognition 151 

conditions. Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking of this 
matter has said : 

"If there is any object worthy the patient and 
continued attention of humanity, it is surely 
those great and pressing problems of whence, 
what, and whither that have occupied the atten- 
tion of prophet and philosopher since time was. 
The discovery of a new star, or of a marking on 
Mars, or of a new element, or of a new extinct 
animal or plant, is interesting; surely the dis- 
covery of a new human faculty is interesting, 
too. The discovery of telepathy has laid the 
way open to the discovery of much more. Our 
aim is nothing less than the investigation and 
better comprehension of human faculty, human 
personality, and human destiny. " 

Telepathy is simply the spirit language. 

" Star to star vibrates light ; can soul to soul 
Strike through a finer element than its own ? " 

Soul to soul can, and does, strike through this 
finer element. The tragedy of the War, the 
stupendous nature of the international conflict 
that began with the August of 1914 and which 



152 They Who Understand 

closed in the early November of 1918, is revealing 
more impressively than it was ever revealed 
before the truth of communion unbroken by 
death. It is a truth that will revolutionize all 
the philosophies in the world and will largely 
modify, if not transform, the systems of education. 
For children will be taught the true nature of 
our relations to the unseen. Death will no longer 
be regarded as a mysterious terror. Through this 
philosophy the spirit of man will have been 
lightened and exalted and enabled to increase in 
spiritual energy. 



VI 



DAILY LIFE TRANSFORMED BY SPIRITUAL 
VISION 

"A Divine light strikes upon me, penetrating through 
this wherein I embosom me ; the virtue of which, con- 
joined with my vision, lifts me above myself so far that 
I see the Supreme Essence from which it emanates. 
Thence comes the joy wherewith I flame, because to 
my vision, in proportion as it is clear, I match the 
clearness of my flame. ... joy! ineffable glad- 
ness ! O life entire of joy and peace ! O riches secure, 
without longing ! . . . Behold now the height and 
breadth of the Eternal Goodness!" 

— Dante : il Paradiso. 
(From the prose translation by Charles Eliot Norton.) 

Thy testimonies are very sure : holiness becometh 
thine house, Lord, for ever. — Psalms : 93 : 6. 

THE Beautiful Days are approaching. 
Every hour brings them nearer. For 
in proportion to the distance that these 
Beautiful Days receded and their experience 
seemed to fade beyond possibility of recovery, — 
in just this proportion they are advancing to 
us and we are approaching to them. 

153 



154 They Who Understand 

"For the path of life is a circle." 

We are about to enter on the new order. 
Human life has been incalculably elevated and 
ennobled by tragedy, sacrifice, suffering. Let 
us not only keep faith for it, but keep faith 
with it. For faith is divinely creative and is 
the condition of realizing that in which it 
believes. Let us keep hope; let us approach 
the new order with courage. With Lowell 
one may say: 

" I have no fear 
Of what is called for by the instinct of mankind." 

What is this unknown future into which man 
is advancing? It is deliverance and salvation. 
For two thousand years the Christian world has 
prayed to be delivered from evil. The gradual 
deliverance, the larger elimination of the evils 
of life are at hand. We are on the threshold of 
a world rich in deeper experiences; glorified 
with higher hope and purpose. New stores of 
cosmic energy shall be unlocked. Man's intel- 
lectual power increases in proportion as he ad- 
vances into this ethereal world. The history 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 155 

of the progress of spiritual brotherhood is the 
history of social evolution. 

Material substances have been regarded as 
the substantial ones out of which to fashion the 
enduring monuments and structures of earth. 
But beyond these is the still more enduring and 
more potent substance of Thought. 

Fundamentally, all things are made by thought 
and will. To create in brick and mortar is a 
slow process ; to create in thought is instantane- 
ous. This higher creative power is about to 
be made so applicable to the conditions of life 
on earth as to produce a marvelous change in 
all industries. Had it been prophesied in the 
early years of the nineteenth century that the 
human voice would be heard from New York 
to San Francisco, from Washington to Hawaii; 
that messages between Europe and the States 
would flash under the ocean; that messages 
sent through the air on a ray of the ether with- 
out visible mechanism, would be transmitted 
around the entire globe, who would have believed 
such a forecasting? Yet within half a century 
all these things have become common knowledge 



156 ' They Who Understand 

and common practice. Man is on the threshold 
of changes still more extraordinary because he 
is about to enter into the realm of higher law. 

The resources of the ethereal realm are infinite. 
In the ethereal energy lies all constructive power ; 
all possibilities of instantaneous communica- 
tion; all possibilities of a new order of transit. 
The spiritualization of matter is the next onward 
step in civilization. Henri Bergson perceives 
this truth. He argues that life should be free, 
spontaneous, that while it is now clogged and 
hampered by matter, its free creative activity 
is the ultimate reality. Monsieur Bergson has 
also offered a speculative theory that is, at least, 
one of curious interest. It is that consciousness, 
which he regards as one great unity, pours itself 
with resistless force through separate individuali- 
ties; that matter, or the soul, being immersed 
in and clogged with matter, is what keeps back 
the rush of life ; that man has but to remove the 
obstacle and more consciousness rushes through. 
" Organize individuality a little, and a little life 
will pass through. Organize it still more highly, 
and the more consciousness, the more life. Or- 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 157 

ganize it elaborately, and still more life will 
come through.' ' It is a common experience to 
perceive that some men are more alive than 
others ; do we find the explanation in the theory 
of Henri Bergson ? 

Arthur James Balfour has asked the question : 
" Is the flood of life really beating against matter 
till it forces an entry through the narrow slit 
of undifferentiated protoplasm?" And he also 
questions as to whether it is possible for philosophy 
to establish the reality of this theory. "Berg- 
son's 'Evolution creatriee 1 is not merely a philo- 
sophic treatment," continues Mr. Balfour; "it 
has all the charms and all the audacities of a work 
of art, and as such defies adequate reproduction. 
Yet let no man regard it is an unsubstantial 
vision. It mingles minute scientific statement 
with the boldest metaphysical speculation. His 
philosophy never wearies of an appeal to concrete 
science." 

Mr. Balfour points out that Professor Hertz 
demonstrated experimentally the identity of 
light and of certain electro-magnetic phenomena. 
Now light consists of undulations of the lumi- 



158 They Who Understand 

niferous ether. Electro-magnetic waves are also 
found to be undulations of this same ether, differ- 
ing from the undulations of light only in length. 
Mr. Balfour then calls attention to this fact : 
that if man had a sense by means of which he 
could perceive the long undulations in the same 
way that he perceives the short ones, this would 
be a new sense and open to him a new world. 

Are we, then, on the very threshold of this new 
world ? Will not this higher life begin to impose 
itself on the ordinary life ? " The electric theory," 
says an English authority, "carries us into a 
new region altogether; it analyzes matter into 
something that is not matter at all, postulating 
nomads as units of electricity." Theosophy 
states an illuminating truth in the following 
affirmation; 

"The invisible worlds interpenetrate the visible, 
the crowds of intelligent beings throng round 
us on every side. Some of these are accessible 
to human requests and others are amenable to 
the human will. Christianity recognizes the 
existence of the higher classes of Intelligences 
under the general name of angels, and teaches 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 159 

that they are 'ministering spirits'; but what is 
their ministry, what the nature of their work, 
what their relationship to human beings ? — 
all that was part of the instruction given in the 
Lesser Mysteries, as the actual communication 
with them was enjoyed in the Greater, but in 
modern days these truths have sunk into the 
background.' ' 

Professor Tyndall found that the luminiferous 
ether is so attenuated and elastic that it can 
convey vibrations of light at a rate of some 
two hundred thousand miles a second. If man 
had the faculties developed to enter into rela- 
tions with such an atmosphere as this, his environ- 
ment would be completely transformed. Life 
would then be in the higher etheric vibrations 
of spiritual substance. The microphone demon- 
strates the actual presence in the atmosphere 
of innumerable waves of sound of which the 
physical ear takes no cognizance. In this realm 
of finer and higher vibrations, too subtle to be 
registered by the ear or the eye, may not spirit 
voices sound? May not the ethereal bodies 
live and move? Such philosophers as Stewart 



160 They Who Understand 

and as Tait postulate the existence of an unseen 
universe, with the strong presumption that it 
is full of life and intelligence, that it is infinitely 
higher in its degree of intelligence than the uni- 
verse we know, as it is infinitely more potent 
in force. Only beings of a higher organization 
could exist in this environment. Stewart and 
Tait contend that we must resort to this subtle 
universe for an explanation of the forces that 
carry on the universe in which we live. To a 
wonderful extent, here and now, the regenera- 
tion of the body can be effected by the renewal 
of the mind, according to the literal counsel of 
Saint Paul. The secret of this renewal is in 
being able to exercise the power to bring currents 
of consciousness into connection with the vital 
cells of the body. It is entirely possible, if one 
may learn the way, to maintain the physical 
mechanism in a state of unbroken health, har- 
mony, and energy. It depends upon spiritual 
initiative. 

The new order of human experience thus 
faintly outlined and fragmentarily suggested 
is that which lies just before humanity at the 






Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 161 

present time. "It doth not yet appear what 
we shall be." But apparently it is a preliminary 
necessity to sweep away old conditions. Indus- 
trial and social problems will be reinterpreted 
and readjusted. May it not be that the Power 
which makes for righteousness employed even 
the tragic means of this recent conflict in order 
to carry humanity to a higher plane? Sacri- 
ficing the kingdoms of the material and the tem- 
poral, man advances into the kingdom of the 
spiritual. 

The vast numbers of young men who so sud- 
denly passed over from the front, carrying with 
them such devotion and love, are bringing the 
life beyond into familiar comprehension. They 
entered there in the spirit expressed by Dante : 

"0 splendor of God, by means of which I saw 
the high triumph of the true kingdom, give me 
power to tell how I saw it !" 

They return to assure those who follow them 
in the unbroken consecration of love that the 
world they enter is as natural as the one they 
leave, and that there is no break in the unity 
of life. They go in joy and triumph. To his 



162 They Who Understand 

mother, just before death, a young soldier wrote : 
! "When I enlisted I knew such a day as this 
might come, but I do not regret it. I am happy 
in the thought that I can make my gift complete. 
Will you not try to be glad and thankful with 
me?" 

One communication from a soldier was given 
by automatic writing to Mr. T. N. Brocas, of 
Auckland, Australia, and was published by the 
recipient in "The Harbinger of Light", a journal 
in Melbourne. The soldier wrote: 

"I am trying to give you all a true and direct 
account of what has happened to me on this side 
of life — that is to say, since I left the earth plane 
on being killed at the Dardanelles by a Turkish 
bullet, as you have no doubt heard already. 
After I sent those shawls to you I was for some 
time in Egypt, but directly after sending those 
last two postcards I, with many others, was 
sent to the Dardanelles to fight the Turks. . . . 
I commenced to run, with my bayonet ready at 
the charge, when I felt a tremendous shock, 
and then all seemed dark for a time, but how 
long I don't know. Then I awoke to find myself 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 163 

standing among strangers. Some seemed to be 
my own people and some seemed like the Turks. 

" I turned to some of those near me and said, 
'Where am I? How did I come here?' and 
'Where is the fight? I cannot see or hear any- 
thing of it, or my companions. ' 

"They smiled, and one of them said, 'We are 
as strange as what you are, and don't know how 
we came here; but I suppose we have been ill 
and have been brought here while unconscious/ 

"But directly after this a strong, active man 
came, quite suddenly, and said, turning to me 
and those near to me, 'Do you not yet realize 
that you are all dead?' and he smiled such a 
smile. I said, ' Dead ! No ! I am not dead ! 
Indeed, I am very much alive, I can tell you; 
but I don't know how I came here. The last 
thing I can remember is charging at those deadly 
Turks, then I felt a shock and woke up here to 
find myself in a strange place.' I found that I 
was really dead. Well, that is to say, I had 
come over into the other side of death, into 
life, and I can tell you, dear friends, it is a life, 
and a greatly better life, than the old one, for 



164 They Who Understand 

there is no more death to fear and look forward 
to. Don't be afraid of death any more; the 
only sting of death is the temporary parting 
from those we love, but even that is softened 
to a great extent, to some at all events, for they 
are allowed to get in touch with their dear ones 
to some extent. 

"I cannot tell you much, but I have met my 
mother, and she and I had so very happy a 
meeting; but we sorrowed over the fact that 
father would be grieving over my death. But, 
oh, it will not be so very long till we are all 
united. 

"I must go, but I will come again later on, 
and will try to tell you more about our life over 
here, and do believe I am really trying to talk to 
you all." 

A series of messages from a soldier to his 
mother, recently published in a small book, 1 
offer an unusual example of fact and incident 
from the unseen. Before he went to the front 
the youth had been an enthusiastic experimenter 

1,4 Thy Son Ldveth." Boston. Little, Brown, and 
Company, 1918. 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 165 

in wireless telegraphy. The apparatus was left 
in his room, and he had half laughingly said to 
his mother, before he went, that he would find 
a way to send her a message through it; this 
promise, however, having to do with his life 
"Somewhere in France" and not in the ethereal 
world. But it was from the latter that the first 
message came. His mother had gone to his room 
to read a letter from him which had just arrived, 
when suddenly the apparatus signalled "Atten- 
tion." She sprang to the key, — she had before 
this learned the code, — and the message came, 
beginning : 

"Mother, be game. I am alive and loving 
you. But my body is with thousands of other 
mothers' boys near Lens." 

Transcribing this, the mother wrote : 
" So the news that my son had been killed came 
to me from his own intelligence by the methods 
we had used together in our experiments in this 
very room. ... I have no explanations or 
proofs other than those that are given here. A 
man who was hilled in battle and is yet alive, and 
able to communicate with the one closest to him in 



166 They Who Understand 

sympathy, must make his own arguments. I 
have no knowledge of established psychic laws 
or limitations. But I know what I know." 

Aside from the wish to communicate with his 
mother, the special desire of this young man was 
to establish the proof of survival after the loss 
of the body in order to comfort other mothers 
and other bereaved homes. This motive, in 
both the messages from many sources, and their 
being shared with the public by those who re- 
ceive them, is felt in common by all. If one family 
thus receives comfort they feel it a duty, as Sir 
Oliver Lodge notes in "Raymond", to pass 
this knowledge on and share it with all who are 
prepared to consider it. One thing that is con- 
tinually emphasized by those in the ethereal 
side is the sorrow caused them by the mourning 
of friends on this side. "Every tear tortures 
the dead" is one expression in a message. "Try 
and make this point plain to the families." 

To all who have close ties in the beyond, one 
chief source of grief is the thought that one 
cannot do anything any more for those so loved. 
It is perhaps true that we miss far more the privi- 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 167 

lege of giving some form of loving service or 
manifestation than we do the receiving of such 
manifestations and precious tributes. One who 
loves finds his dearest joy in doing something 
for the one beloved. But we can do infinite 
and wonderful things for those who have passed 
into the ethereal. We can do far more for them 
than was ever possible when they were on earth. 
For it is far more important; it offers far more 
of joy to the recipient to sympathize with his 
thought, to companion him in spirit, than it 
did in this life to offer him material tokens. And 
this companionship of spirit is so rich in its satis- 
factions. 

" Now I can love thee truly, 
For nothing comes between 
The senses and the spirit ; 
The Seen and the Unseen." 

For the first time, in the sweet relations of 
affection, the closeness of the spiritual relation 
transcends all others; and, as Lowell expresses 
it in the stanza above, there are no longer ob- 
stacles to come between. 



168 They Who Understand 

First of all, the beautiful offering we can make 
to them is not to sorrow and grieve in a way that 
shadows and impairs all their new interest and 
happiness. Realizing the spiritual presence and 
companionship, we can share these interests and 
happiness. 

In a lyric embodying much of truth occur 
these stanzas : 

" How can I cease to pray for thee ? Somewhere 
In God's great universe thou art to-day. 
Can He not reach thee with His tender care ? 
Can He not hear me when for thee I pray ? 

"What matters it to Him who holds within 

The hollow of His hand all worlds, all space, 

That thou art done with earthly pain and sin? 

Somewhere within His ken thou hast a place. 

" Somewhere thou livest and hast need of Him ; 
Somewhere thy soul sees higher heights to 
climb, 
And somewhere still there may be valleys dim 
That thou must pass to reach the hills sub- 
lime." 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 169 

In these latter years we are exchanging a 
faith that includes much definite knowledge for 
the former faith that included no knowledge at 
all of the conditions of life beyond. Science 
penetrates into the nature of the ethereal realm; 
spiritual perceptions on this side and the great 
mass of messages from those beyond unite in 
establishing some very clear conceptions of 
both the nature of life and its environment for 
those beyond the visible. A death in the house- 
hold tends to draw each member of it into the 
radiant atmosphere. There is the strange, sweet 
sense of a different order of companionship; 
there are thought and message and feeling that 
flash between in telepathic form of expression. 
Shall not one then so enter into the spiritual 
loveliness of the transition that he shall walk 
in joy in conscious sympathy with his friend? 
For this is the priceless gift he may make, the 
service he may still render. 

There is undoubtedly a deeper significance 
than we have been accustomed to give to the 
assurance of Jesus when He said : 

"If ye abide in me, and my words abide in 



170 They Who Understand 

you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done 
unto you." 

The words are not a vague and mystic phras- 
ing that mean nothing in particular when 
analyzed. Here is a definite promise: "Ye 
shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto 
you." But this promise is conditioned; and 
the condition is something marvelous. For what 
is it to abide in Christ? It is something more 
than to follow Him; it is nothing less than the 
complete identification of the human self with the 
divine. 

The question readily arises as to whether 
such complete spiritualization of life is possible 
to any man while on earth. Does not the very 
question itself suggest that this spiritualization 
of life is not a question of environment, nor one 
in any manner conditioned by the objective world, 
but that it is the problem of spiritual achieve- 
ment ; of more and more entering into the spirit 
of Him who had conquered all lower inclinations 
and had thus become at one with the divine? 
To the degree, then, to which man, now and here, 
can thus enter into and merge his whole being 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 171 

in God, to tJiat degree, and no more, may he receive 
the fulfillment of the promise, "Ask what ye 
will, and it shall be done unto you." This 
promise is on that plane of life from which all 
selfishness has been excluded. The exclusion 
of selfish purposes does not necessarily mean the 
exclusion of what we call material things. There 
is nothing inherently wrong in a material object. 
It depends upon the use that it serves. In the 
physical world material objects are our signs and 
symbols; what are food, clothing, shelter, the 
first necessities of aid to the distressed, but ma- 
terial things? For they may be divinely used, 
as Jesus Himself divinely used physical aid and 
relief. The entire purpose of life, — life in the 
sense of its extension into all the infinite eterni- 
ties, — is to increasingly lay hold on the divine. 
To conquer the tendencies that drag us down; 
to conquer selfishness, self-indulgence, injustice ; 
to live on the plane where we take the good of 
another to be our own ; where we joyfully sacri- 
fice the lower that we may rise to the higher. It 
is not too much to say that these lessons are 
impressively imaged before man by the awful 



172 They Who Understand 

tragedy of the conflict of nations. Its lesson of 
self-sacrifice; of the sacrifice of the lower life 
to gain the higher, is as unmistakable as the 
Handwriting on the Wall. In the individual 
instances are revealed the universal spirit. One 
youth, himself the descendant of a Revolutionary 
hero, leaving his studies at Harvard, made his 
way to France as cabin boy on a cattle boat and 
gained his admission to the Ecole a" Aviation 
Militaire. He wrote his name as a hero in the 
battles of the air. He destroyed many enemy 
air-craft. Then, on a golden September day 
in 1918, while patroling the American lines, 
came the fatal shot, and his body was tenderly 
laid in a field " golden with buttercups." What 
had this youthful spirit not achieved of the 
sublimest order of life, of the absolute partaking 
of the divine life? "This I say," were his words 
when he left, "that if I die, I will die fighting." 
And the mother, learning of his death, could say, 
"And what could be more glorious than to die 
fighting the enemy? It was a glorious death 
my son had, to glide down to earth on territory 
held by the American troops after he had done 



Daily Life Transformed by Spiritual Vision 173 

his best and given his all. The mothers of the 
United States and in all the countries are doing 
what God did. He gave His only begotten Son 
that liberty might have life." 

Of such greatness of spirit was the power created 
that carried on the War. Was it nothing for a 
nation to rise from a life of easy pleasure and 
leisurely pursuits to such sublimity of soul as 
this? This one example which can be contem- 
plated only through eyes dim with tears, but also 
with heart and soul uplifted in gratitude to the 
Divine Father that such splendor of spiritual 
exaltation is possible, is only typical of the spirit 
of all this Flower of Youth, — these young 
Knights of the Holy Cross, who go forth in the 
consecration of utter sacrifice of self that Liberty 
may be enthroned and triumphant. It is he 
who loseth his life that shall find it. Is it not 
true that the ineffable blessedness of abiding 
in the Christ is entered upon by such greatness 
of soul? Are we, then, as a nation, beginning 
to realize the actual significance of many of the 
divine promises whose deeper meaning has 
never before been revealed to us? "If ye abide 



174 They Who Understand 

in Me, and my words abide in you, ye shall 
ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." 
The young men of all the nations who have thus 
triumphantly and joyfully given their lives that 
the nations may live are thus entering on a spirit- 
ual heritage, incalculable in its power and 
glory. With what marvelous beauty and in- 
tensity of energies do they find themselves 
after the withdrawal from the physical body, 
which has served its purpose and is discarded. 
Imagination falters before the vision of this 
resplendent life just beyond. 

"And they need no candle, neither light of 
sun, for the Lord God giveth them light." 



VII 

"HERE AM I, LORD; SEND ME" 

"Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom 
shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, 
Here am I ; send me." — Isaiah : 6 : 8. 

IT is this voice, it is this response, that we 
hear abroad in the land. The heavens are 
illumined by flashes of Brahmic splendor. 
There are sacrifice, privation, and sorrow. There 
are glad renunciations; there is a choral spon- 
taneity of response to the voice of the Lord, 
"Whom shall I send and who will go for us?" 
The Divine Life is manifesting itself anew through 
the uncounted thousands of the youth who 
respond, "Here am I; send me." The moral 
grandeur; the intellectual illumination; the 
new sense of Immortality, — the marvel and 
glory of these new conditions of life through 
which all humanity is rising to a higher spiritual 
plane, mark this period as a crisis in all the 
history of mankind. This is the age, not of denial 

175 



176 They Who Understand 

and darkness, — it is the age of transfiguration. 
It is the process of the spiritual regeneration of 
man. These are the appointed conditions by 
means of which his latent higher faculties are 
being aroused. 

From this age onward he is to be a new crea- 
ture. He in whom this divine light has not 
flashed forth in an awakening is still asleep in 
the spirit, and can no more bring his forces to 
bear than a sleeping man can guide or prosecute 
a given work. Man must become aware of his 
higher consciousness. An ancient writer coun- 
sels, "Throw away your imperfections and 
become perfect in God." If ever in human his- 
tory the hour had arrived in which such counsel 
as this might be considered in its fullest signifi- 
cance, it is in the present. The conditions are 
unprecedented in all the annals of civilization. 
This War was a great spiritual conflict. All 
the possibilities of future civilizations are being 
weighed in the balance. The issues are so vast, 
so incredible, that it would be strange if their 
very magnitude did not blind our eyes. The 
call to arms was the call to spiritual energy. 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 177 

The soul of man is to be liberated; to be freed 
from the bondage of the many inadvertent errors 
of which, in easy and prosperous times, we took 
little notice. The little vanities and vexations 
of life; the unconscious selfishness of self-indul- 
gences; the personal extravagance in dress, 
in appointments; the compromise with lower 
standards, — all these must go. And when 
they have gone mankind has thrown off a burden 
and a material weight. It is not that the soul 
would renounce art, beauty, poetry, all the 
loveliness of life. But she would renounce 
somewhat of artificial standards and require- 
ments with which she has been impeded. 

"Then why pause with indecision 
When bright angels in thy vision 
Beckon thee to Fields Elysian?" 

To "throw away imperfections and become 
perfect in God" does not sound like so impossible 
a counsel to consider, — even to aspire toward, 
— in 1919, as it would have appeared in 1914 ; 
for these five years have wrought a signal change 
in the spiritual outlook. Visions, ideals, are 



178 They Who Understand 

in the air. Dreams of a more perfect humanity 
haunt the heart. "God's kingdom must come 
and it is our business to see that it comes," 
the great and good Edward Everett Hale used 
often to say. He had the soul of the prophet. 
The time has come sooner than he would have 
dreamed, when the literal fulfillment of these 
words must establish itself. For the full free- 
dom of the nations implies the freedom of the 
individual soul. It is the appointed task for 
this age to create a new heaven and a new earth. 
Each individual must become a temple of the Holy 
Spirit, manifesting this hitherto undreamed- 
of power. Why, this is not the call to loss, to 
privation, to poverty of life, or effort, or spirit. 
It is not the call to renounce all the culture, the 
charm of life, all that we have held as so desirable 
and essential in the past. It is the call to such 
richness as man has never known. It is the call 
to exalt culture and beauty and the enchantments 
of life to a nobler plane. Is it any wonder that 
this young knighthood instinctively recognized 
the Divine Voice that was abroad in the land, 
and sprang with eager joy to respond to its bid- 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 179 

ding? How the flaming lines of Emerson make 
themselves heard anew ; 

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
The youth replies, J can." 

For the past quarter of a century the world 
has heard much, through the ethical teachings 
of India, as scattered broadcast by the itinerant 
Swamis who have lectured everywhere, of the 
great benefits of the practice of man's union with 
his higher self, known under the Indian term of 
Yoga. The man's union with his higher self 
is being effected in ways unforeseen. It has 
become the practical necessity of the hour. 

All these forces are leading to a restatement 
of the Christian religion. The exclusion in this 
restatement is merely negligible; the inclusion 
of larger truth, or of a more perfect interpreta- 
tion of the truth, is one of importance. It is 
to include faith in immortality, not merely as a 
religious expression to which the layman attached 
only a vague meaning, but as a vital and clearly 



180 They Who Understand 

comprehended fact of life. There will be in- 
cluded a recognition of psychical truth. There 
will be included the comprehension of the nature 
of the change we call death and an unquestioned 
conviction of the unity of the individual life in 
the physical and the ethereal worlds. We 
shall grasp the fact that the withdrawal from 
the physical body has no more power to change 
the man himself, in any instant way, than has 
the substitution of one costume for another. 

With that closer walk with God for which the 
soul of Cowper sighed and which this restate- 
ment of religion will enjoin, will be included 
that easy, natural recognition of the presence 
of friends who have passed beyond, that recog- 
nition and telepathic communion of compan- 
ionship to which much allusion has been made 
in previous pages of this little volume. It is not 
strange that when this companionship and com- 
munion is presented under the aspects of weird 
and incomprehensible physical phenomena the 
religious man should turn from it as something 
that desecrates that which he holds sacred ; but 
seen in its true light, as a component part of our 



"Here Am J, Lord; Send Me 1 ' 181 

own spiritual life, just as social companionships 
and the sweetness of friendships are a component 
part of our life in the visible world, then will it 
be estimated aright. Then will it be seen as 
a part of the spiritual atmosphere of life pre- 
sented by Jesus, the Christ. Man will come to 
realize not only that there is no such thing as 
death, save as a name defining a change of condi- 
tions in the onward progress of conscious life, 
but that this change causes no separation. No 
one has formulated the new and more extended 
view of truth into a clearer presentation than has 
Epes Sargent in the following propositions: 

"(1) Man is an organized duality, consisting 
of an organic spiritual form, evolved coincidently 
with and pervading his physical body, having 
corresponding organs and developments. 

"(2) Death is the separation of this duality 
and effects no immediate change in the spirit, 
neither intellectually nor morally. 

"(3) Progressive evolution of the moral and 
intellectual nature is the destiny of individuals; 
the knowledge, experience, and attainments of 
earth life form the basis of the spirit life." 



182 



They Who Understand 



Mr. Sargent, a poet, a thinker, an accomplished 
man of letters, was the editor of the Harpers' 
" Cyclopedia of British and American Poetry ", the 
most notable, finely selected, and complete poetic 
anthology that existed up to the time of its publi- 
cation in 1880. Since then - a new school of 
poetry has arisen, of which, at that time, Walt 
Whitman was almost the only herald. Under 
the date of April, 1886, Doctor Hiram Corson 
wrote to Walt Whitman, saying, "There are 
points upon which I have been long pondering — 
one, especially, that of language-shaping, and 
the tendency toward impassioned prose, which 
I feel will be the poetic form of the future, and 
of which I think your ' Leaves of Grass* is the 
most marked prophecy/ ' 

Mr. Sargent's death occurred just before this 
important Cyclopedia was published. In the 
announcement of the volume the Harpers char- 
acterize him as a man of complex nature, high 
aspirations, and one whose profound knowledge 
of literature, whose clear, acute, and discriminat- 
ing judgment eminently fitted him for this work, 
the crowning work of his life. In his spirituality 



11 Here Am 7, Lord; Send Me" 183 

of nature, as distinguished from the merely formal 
and academic, Mr. Sargent had the keenest 
and most unerring poetic intuitions. With this 
he united a philosophic bent; and in the early 
days of manifestations from the unseen world 
he had given serious and discriminating study 
to the phenomena. He had become convinced 
of the truth of communication between the two 
conditions of life in the physical and in the 
ethereal. He felt the truth that was later to 
be so well expressed by Doctor Charles W. 
Eliot when he said : 

" The religion of the future will not be gloomy, 
ascetic, or maledictory; it will deal, not chiefly 
with sorrow and death, but with joy and life." 
Religion becomes joyful and vital and replete 
with creative energy when the manifestations 
of the spiritual universe are recognized in their 
true relation to the physical world. To restrict 
human perception to that of the physical senses 
alone limits man's world as the deprivation of 
sight and hearing limit the world of the persons 
thus afflicted. It is in proportion as man exer- 
cises his spiritual faculties that his world is en- 



184 They Who Understand 

larged and made more significant, more intense 
in its energies, more enthralling in its interests. 

It is difficult to conceive of a statement more 
reasonable, or one that could more entirely 
commend itself to the moral judgment of the 
individual, than these three propositions for- 
mulated by Mr. Epes Sargent. That there is 
an organic spiritual form that exists entirely 
independent of the physical body, but which 
uses the physical body as an instrument through 
which to function during the sojourn on earth, 
has been abundantly proven both by science and 
by psychic study. That the process we call 
death is merely the separation of the man from 
his temporary instrument of communication 
with the physical world is abundantly recognized. 
That the progressive evolution of the intellectual 
and moral nature is the unending experience 
is a presumption supported by all religions; 
by all systems of ethics ; by the intuitive recogni- 
tion of the soul. Jesus came to bring life and 
immortality to light ; that is, to make clear this 
fundamental truth of the endless process of spirit- 
ual evolution. 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 185 

They who understand realize that the intelli- 
gent comprehension of man as a spiritual being 
has no relation to the idle and meaningless asser- 
tions made by those who have no definite con- 
ceptions of the true nature of life. Mere physi- 
cal phenomena, genuine or fraudulent as they 
may be, are not a factor in the matter. The 
investigations and conclusions are on another 
plane. The true comprehension of the spiritual 
nature of man has to do with conduct, which 
Matthew Arnold rightly defined as being three 
fourths of life. It is a man's conduct which is 
the unerring touchstone of his degree of spiritual 
advancement. 

The nature and conditions of life in the ethereal 
are becoming still more real, to say nothing of 
far greater and more universal concern, by the 
multitude of homes bereaved by the War. Love 
follows these vast numbers of young soldiers 
who died at the front into the experiences that 
immediately awaited them, — the conditions upon 
which they immediately entered. Communica- 
tions have been frequent. Many of these are 
so linked with personal remembrances of their 



186 They Who Understand 

life here as to be amply evidential, even to 
the vigilant psychic researcher. They speak of 
these conditions with the utmost naturalness. 
They confront aspects which they do not under- 
stand and about which they speculate much as 
they would here in entering on a new environ- 
ment. In one of these communications we find 
the young man saying that after a period of 
helping on the battlefield they were to leave for 
another place. "We did not fly, or float," he 
says. "We just marched at a rattling good 
pace. The only strange thing about it was that 
we did not mind such natural 'obstacles as for- 
ests or rivers, but went right along through them 
or over them. . . . We passed through vil- 
lages shelled and destroyed. There were human 
bodies everywhere. From this point of view 
there is no more in death than removal from one 
house to another." The communicator speaks 
of their conductor — one who had been longer 
an inhabitant of the ethereal — as apparently 
receiving instructions in a way that puzzled the 
newcomer. "There were no messengers or me- 
chanical means like telephones or wireless. But 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 187 

it seems we acquire the ability to hear anything 
addressed to us, personally, through any amount 
of space. That is how you reach us. And 
what we are trying to do now is to have you hear 
us as well as we hear you." x 

This suggestion will particularly appeal to 
those who understand. There is, all in all, an 
accumulation of testimony that those in the 
unseen can, and do, hear the spoken voice. Then 
the next thing that follows is that those on earth 
shall also hear the voice from the unseen realms, 
and distinguish the spoken words. Clairaudience 
is the power of hearing with the spiritual sense. 
The words fall upon the mind with all the reality 
of tone and inflection, Clairaudience thus dif- 
fers from the telepathic method, by means of 
which the thought is flashed upon the mind, but 
without this sense of tone and inflection. The 
young soldier from whose communications the 
above extracts are taken also said : 

"I get all your messages, mother. I can only 
answer a few questions. Partly because I am 

1 " Thy Son Liveth." Boston. Little, Brown, and 
Company, 1918. 



188 They Who Understand 

not yet sure of many things here, and partly 
because there seems to be no means of communi- 
cation concerning certain conditions. That is, 
when we get beyond the usual, we are beyond 
the common medium of language. The words 
we know are inadequate to express our revela- 
tions." 

This suggests that telepathy is of a higher 
and more universal order as a means of communi- 
cation than clairaudience. The latter is limited 
in its scope to language as we know it on earth ; 
the former has the infinite possibilities of the 
infinite universe. 

In this world we find the individual life greatly 
enlarged and its capacities multiplied by the 
acquirement of new languages. The classics, 
the romance languages, open to man new worlds 
of life and of literature. They enable their 
possessor to enter into many phases of life and 
thought otherwise impenetrable to him. Is it 
unreasonable to infer from this that the ability 
to easily converse with those in the next higher 
state of life would be a signal advance in evolu- 
tionary progress? Removed from the associa- 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 189 

tion of the phenomenal, the inconsequential (as 
the phenomenal is but too apt to be), it would 
simply be a factor in the general enlargement 
of intelligence; an increasing comprehension of 
the universe in which we live; and the cancel- 
ing of the former mystery (not to say the terror) 
of death. It would thus eliminate the one great- 
est sorrow of human life. We should come to 
understand the nature of the change and know 
that it did not involve the separation of entire 
silence. It would be of incalculable intellectual 
benefit as well as consolatory. It would be far 
more; even that of the more intimate compre- 
hension of the Divine Wisdom. 

"These things I have spoken unto you that 
in me ye might have peace/' said Jesus; the 
words conveying the assurance that increased 
comprehension of the unseen life gave to man 
increased peace of mind and freedom from anx- 
iety. "In the world ye shall have tribulation," 
He added ; " but be of good cheer ; I have over- 
come the world." To have tribulation "in the 
world" does not mean that tribulation has geo- 
graphical assignments and is a factor in one 



190 They Who Understand 

realm inherently, and not in another. Tribula- 
tion is a condition of imperfect and defective 
spiritual life. The more completely man may 
unite his spirit with the divine order, the less 
his tribulation. He may endure privation, dis- 
aster, but shall we not learn to distinguish be- 
tween these and tribulation, which is the result 
of mingled ignorance and selfishness. One 
may be hungry, or cold, or limited in a thousand 
ways of discomfort and inconvenience without 
being at all selfish or ignorant. He may so 
discriminate between temporary discomfort and 
onward progress as to enable him to patiently 
endure and vigilantly strive. To "endure as 
seeing the invisible" is of profound significance. 
It is the condition of faith that sees beyond the 
temporary, and faith is the creative power by 
which the immediate and temporary can be 
transmuted into the noble and the satisfactory. 
The "world" in which tribulation is a factor is 
a condition of spirit. Jesus overcame that 
lower condition ; man may overcome that lower 
condition. When he rises into the larger spiritual 
life he has overcome tribulation. Rising into 



"Here Am J, Lord;" Send Me" 191 

this larger spiritual life; feeling one's self a 
part of it, the sorrow for the dead, the grief 
and loneliness incident to the change, are 
transmuted to a new sense of the beauty and 
the joy of the new relations that have been 
established. 

"Let not your heart be troubled," urges the 
Divine Teacher; reminding us that we already 
believe in God, and enjoining that we also believe 
in Him. For it is He ; it is His personal experi- 
ence and assurance that reveal to us the true 
nature of death. He demonstrated that this 
change had no power over the immortal being. 
"Now," He says, "ye have sorrow." That is, 
while uncomprehending of the nature of the 
great adventure, while still ignorant of its entire 
significance, "ye have sorrow"; then comes the 
assurance, "But I w T ill see you again, and your 
heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh 
from you." The words are as vital to-day as 
they were two thousand years ago. They appeal 
to us with the deeper meaning because man has 
advanced to a true comprehension of all that 
they mean. They lift us into the Blessed Assur- 



192 They Who Understand 

ance; they open to us the celestial gates, even 
the Gates of New Life. 

Is it, then, that the final magnitude of the 
result of the War shall be, — not only the estab- 
lishment of more just industrial and economic 
conditions; not only the promotion of tem- 
perance and the downfall of intemperance and 
the evils in its train ; not only the bringing about 
of needed reforms and the promotion of better 
social conditions; not only a renaissance of Art 
and Literature, enriched and ennobled by all 
the deepening of life in the world's tragedy ; but 
shall the supreme result of this mighty conflict 
of the nations with its sending into the Beyond 
these vast masses of noble youth be the develop- 
ment of the latent spiritual powers of man and 
the recognition that death need not cause sepa- 
ration; that, indeed, it gives the conditions of 
the closest union of spirit to spirit? Life would 
be transformed; readjusted at once to a higher 
plane. All its interests, and thereby its possi- 
bilities of happiness, its capacities for zest and 
enjoyments, would be tremendously extended. 
For the larger that one's individual world be- 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 193 

comes in its potentialities of achievement, its 
call to action, its unfolding of greater purposes, 
the larger areas of happiness does it offer. 

"Dismiss the delusion that matter is not in- 
formed with spirit, and that God knows nothing 
of matter," says Archdeacon Wilberforce ; "mat- 
ter, incidents, material conditions, life experi- 
ences, are the spirit's media through which He 
speaks to us. . . . When you blend the con- 
scious mind with the Infinite Mind you are dwell- 
ing in the ' secret place of the Most High.' While 
you are thus mentally dwelling in 'the secret 
place \ no sorrow can touch you, no anxiety can 
fret you; you are in full communion with the 
spirit beings on the other side; you are in vital 
union with the Infinite Spirit." 

From such communion one brings stores of 
renewed energy to press on in his duties and 
occupations. Humanity is on the eve of remark- 
able changes and transformations. The dawn- 
ing recognition of powers in every individual 
that link him in natural and unbroken compan- 
ionship with those who have passed from the 
physical realm; that make possible, by means 



194 They Who Understand 

of this conscious recognition, the blending of 
effort in both worlds for the progress and up- 
lifting of the universal life; this general move- 
ment of rising to higher planes of perception 
is a pledge and prophecy of the most inspiring 
nature. 

"0, Days of the Future, I believe in you!" 
Nor can one fail to catch on the air the wonder- 
ful message of the poet: 
"O my brothers and sisters! It is not chaos or 

death. It is form, union, plan, — 
It is Eternal Life, — it is Happiness!" 

The messages from many of the youth who 
have passed on bear witness to the naturalness 
of the life on which they enter. There are as- 
pects of it that continue the aspects familiar to 
them here. There are new conditions resulting 
from the ethereal environment, about which 
they speculate as a man might in a foreign coun- 
try on confronting conditions hitherto unknown 
to him. "To acquire the ability to hear any- 
thing personally addressed to us, through any 
amount of space," was one thing that aroused 
the curiosity of the young man from whose 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 195 

messages several quotations have been made. 
What more natural ? 

When Doctor Graham Bell first exhibited the 
telephone, how eagerly people discussed this 
new and apparent possibility of speaking beyond 
the known limits of the human voice; and how 
incredible to the students of the invention in 
1868 would have been the extensions of its ser- 
vice as practiced in the daily life of 1919 ! The 
speculations, and the conclusions arrived at, as 
revealed by Raymond Lodge; as revealed by 
many other of the young men ; the conjectures, 
the assertions, the observations and inferences 
of all this body of youth who suddenly enter on 
the succeeding conditions of this endless life, form 
a mass of testimony that is far from unimportant. 
It is not an unimportant fact that the father of 
one of these young men who has been able (be- 
cause of the cooperation of his parents) to com- 
municate with the life here, is known as the 
world's greatest living scientist and one whose 
spiritual perceptions are so developed as to enable 
him to become a reliable interpreter of the nature 
and possibilities of this communication; one 



196 They Who Understand 

whose sympathy with other bereaved families 
is so great that he felt constrained to place on 
public record all that he felt most helpful in the 
messages from his own son, and thus share these 
with all who value them. Sir Oliver Lodge 
had been absolutely convinced of the reality of 
communion between the two worlds long before 
this communion had become to him so vital 
a matter as to its truth or fallacy. With no 
uncertain note he had more than once stated 
that he knew those whom we call dead could 
speak to us; that they are far more aware of 
life here than we dream ; that personal communi- 
cation is not only possible but that it is an as- 
sured and unquestionable fact. With the pass- 
ing of his son this assurance could not but become 
a more vital matter to him. The comfort it 
has afforded is the comfort that may reach every 
sorrowing home. It is in the Divine Order. 

Apparently these young men who in all the 
glow and freshness of ardent youth passed into 
the ethereal world so instantly, who daily faced 
this immediate possibility, are inevitably uplifted 
to the higher plane of life, whether they vanish 



"Here Am I, Lord; Send Me" 197 

from earth, or still remain. Life to them can 
never be the same again. They have stood too 
near to the divine realities. If they return to 
enter into the affairs of the present; or if they 
enter on the work of the next plane, they bring 
to bear, in either case, a new influence. Those 
who pass on seem to find little break in the 
continuity of their lives. They speak of being 
with their comrades the same as here. They 
are full of plans and interests. The special gift, 
or attraction, often repressed by circumstances 
when on earth, springs into activity in the new 
life. 

How often, in this part of life, is it true that 
the one whose soul was in music has been obliged 
to adopt a business career; the born scientist 
has applied himself to agriculture or to industrial 
concerns. The freedom of the ethereal realm 
at once liberates the individual from a distasteful 
occupation, precisely as some suddenly fortunate 
circumstance in this world may set a man free 
from enforced labor and permit him to enter on 
the line for which he most cares. Mr. Lowell 
found his chair in Harvard a burden to his life. 



198 They Who Understand 

He longed for the leisure demanded by his poetic 
gift and the freedom that would enable him to 
devote himself to literature. When at last 
this came he joyfully resigned his professorship. 
Similar matters of release from the distasteful 
occupation appear to be the experience in the 
ethereal life. 

This assurance alone has its consolation for 
those in the home left desolate and bereaved. 
Nor is there unmixed desolation to those who 
find themselves initiated into the larger truth. 
They who understand find that understanding 
brings courage, trust, and joy. They who 
understand enter on a new and more intimate 
spiritual companionship with their beloved. Thus 
do they both give and receive a new order of 
happiness. For it is this gift we may still offer 
to the one so dear, — the gift of sympathetic 
comprehension of his new life. His gallant 
spirit heard the call, — "Whom shall I send, and 
who will go for us ? " And in all the ardor of his 
divine enthusiasm he replied, " Here am I, Lord ; 
send me!" Could the love that so tenderly 
enfolds him mar his new happiness with unbroken 



"Here Am 7, Lord; Send Me" 199 

gloom and lament? Shall it not rise into per- 
fect understanding and sympathy with the 
glory that has been revealed to him ? The glory 
shall encompass life here as well as that on the 
higher plane. Love unites both realms, and no 
separation of spirit is possible. Love shares 
the glory and the beauty of the transfiguration. 
It is they who understand who shall thus enter 
into the gladness and the radiance which enfold 
and exalt the beloved in their new life and shall 
thus enter into the joy of the Lord. 

And then? 

Then, "The sun shall be no more thy light by 
day; neither for brightness shall the moon give 
light unto thee ; but the Lord shall be unto thee 
an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. 

" Thy sun shall no more go down ; neither shall 
thy moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall 
be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy 
mourning shall be ended. " 

It is they who understand who shall enter into 
the realizations of the Blessed Promise. It is 
they who understand who shall hear, as if borne 
on the air, the divine assurance: 



200 They Who Understand 

"For our light affliction, which is but for 
a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory ; 

"While we look not at the things which are 
seen, but at the things which are not seen; for 
the things which are seen are temporal ; but the 
things which are not seen are Eternal ! " 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



